LinkedIn rolled out a career mapping tool today, targeting it at students from the 60 colleges that provide the bulk of new talent for PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The accounting firm sponsored the rollout and gets top billing for its jobs.
The Wall Street Journal says PwC paid millions (exactly how much wasn’t disclosed) for the privilege of getting first crack at the students. Other jobs from accounting firms may also appear, but PwC not only gets its jobs listed first, it also gets space on the Career Explorer pages for a branding campaign and for career content.
Career Explorer, as LinkedIn is calling its mapping tool, is much like similar services offered by some job boards, and bears a passing similarity to Monster’s. LinkedIn, though, has a whole network to leverage. As you might expect, for every job it displays in a student’s career path, it uses its network to show who works at the company.
College students with multiple potential entry points and career paths (think an MBA student, or an accounting B.A.) can plot various paths.
Then appears a list of next-step jobs, drawn from the accumulated experience of LinkedIn’s millions of member profile. You also get told how likely each of those jobs is, based on your particular profile and pathway choices. LinkedIn then displays who among their connections might be able to help.
No connection? LinkedIn will suggest some. Like a particular company? There are some 1 million company profiles on the site that can be followed for jobs, contacts, etc., sort of how you might on Twitter.
One of the other strong features about Career Explorer is the salary information that accompanies career path positions. Though the range can be broad for some generic titles — attorney was part of my career progression — drill down and the salary info gets much more specific. There’s also graphical displays of job and age distribution.
According to all the accounts about this new service, it’s only supposed to be available for the students at the PwC selected colleges. But I found it working for me, though not with all the options college students at the 60 schools get. Go here and try it out. Eventually, the service will be extended to all comers.
Last week LinkedIn launched Signal, which lets you filter through the Twitter noise — and LinkedIn’s own updates — to zero in on messages of relevance. The Signal triptych window gives you the filters in one-third, tweets, and updates of relevance in another third based on the filtering you choose, and in the last, trending links, that are potentially related and relevant.
Signal is a beta rollout, so only some LinkedIn members have access to it. Not me, however. Over at our sister site, The Fordyce Letter, there’s more detail about LinkedIn Signal.