Recently, I was invited by a friend to a virtual event that was supposed to award 100 Filipinos on an online community called LinkedIn Philippines. At first I was hesitant because when I took a cursory look at the nominees, they were all relatively young.
Still being curious by nature, I acceded. I’m glad I did, because even if I was among a sea of millennials, I never felt out of place on that evening. I discovered that it is an inclusive circle where age or calling in life does not matter.
As a writer who puts great significance on words, I immediately liked the name. “Link” means you are connected to others and then “in” means you are embraced by a group. That’s it, the two words say it all. I also found out that it’s a global community and LinkedIn Philippines is our local community network.
The very first thing that made me completely comfortable was the reassuring presence of a senior citizen who gave the keynote message in a chatty friendly way. This fellow I am referring to in this article’s title has been winning in this event for the past 3 years and he would probably have won it again this year. I guess the organizers felt he’s won enough and instead honored him as the first recipient of the hall of fame award.
His name is Francis Kong, columnist, mentor, resource speaker, consultant and one of the more prominent personalities who can be found on LinkedIn Philippines. I myself read his columns in a daily broadsheet, which are echoed in a radio station. I’ve picked up many things from his “talks” and it’s no wonder his LinkedIn site scores high on the engagement criterion.
The top 100 Filipinos on LinkedIn Awards is the brainchild of Virginia Bautista, a personal branding strategist, who, I believe, was among the first to be on LinkedIn in the Philippines. I believe her objective in launching this event is to put the spotlight on Filipino professionals and achievers who can inspire others in the LinkedIn global community.
As I was looking at the faces of the individuals and hearing their names being called one by one, I was transported back to my school days when the high school principal was calling the names of those who made it to the honor list. In my first year and second year, I was not called on the stage. But in my heart, I resolved to be in the list the next year. And I made it happen. Someone said: “Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.” And being better means you have to be willing to step outside your comfort zone, for often what you want is there.
It is apparent that on LinkedIn, people are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves. A British author and professor named Sarah Bakewell says it well for all of us: “You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress.”
I have to admit that perhaps not all who are on LinkedIn are authentic. Maybe some profiles are fictitious. As one expert puts it, the digital world gives “the tools of fiction-making to everybody equally, so long as they have access to a computer.” Social media rewards acquisitive networking and its platforms are “a marketplace of selfhood,” an idea that echoes in the post-modern way of the sociologist Erving Goffman’s Presentation Of Self In Everyday Life, an old book of mine that I should perhaps read again because I might discover social observations that still ring true today.
For better or worse, our way of making a living is being done at least half in public, with individuals in search of followers and perhaps their collectives or kindred spirits.
This is why this event is a good thing. Its set of criteria separates the authentic from the fictive. Content alone will give you away. What you post is a clue to what you really are. You can’t fake it. In her LinkedIn site, Virgie reveals that for this year, there were 343 nominees, 217 qualified based on the criteria, and only the top 100 with the highest number of followers made it to the final list. This event is definitely not one of those bogus award-giving bodies that insouciantly give away awards to any individual or company willing to pay the asking price.
I wish we had LinkedIn 50 years ago when I was a young employee on my first job. Then you had no one to talk to, no mentor to guide you about your career. The HR departments were incompetent or useless when it came to career counseling and mentoring. I could not share or exchange best practices because my workmates were inexperienced themselves and were just too focused on how to pay the bills.
I had to make my own career path by myself, reading a few magazines and books, mostly biographies or autobiographies of successful people. I never had an idea about other careers or trends in the industry. But I managed to slog along. But I could have stepped forward much faster if I had a community of kindred aspirational spirits like the ones in LinkedIn. All we had were classified ads that were not even useful because they never gave out any context about the job being offered. Some were misleading, promising a high salary only to be told during the interview that there was a quota to be met to get it.
To get a better job during that time, you had to have connections or you know someone in a company who alerted you when a job becomes vacant.
Now with LinkedIn you are connected to your fellow professionals. You get to engage with them as well as your future employers. Through your profile, you can showcase your professional life, milestones, skills and interests. With the Open To Work feature, you can privately tell recruiters or publicly share with the LinkedIn community that you are looking for new job opportunities.
It’s awesome to learn that LinkedIn has 750 million plus members around the world, which include 7 million Filipinos. That’s a vast community and a cornucopia of useful and varied content that you can access for knowledge, insights and opportunities, whether you’re just starting a new job, or you want to enhance your present career or veer off to a second career.
It is like enormous living breathing organism, because it continuously evolves in real time, as more new members join and current members update and manage their individual profiles and keep refreshing their contents, some on a regular basis.
LinkedIn doesn’t just help connect people better to opportunities, it continuously builds up a vast reservoir of talents and skills that organizations and corporate entities can tap to recruit new employees or to draw powerful insights that they can use as they plan the future of their work force.
The thing I like most about the LinkedIn community is the intergenerational mix among the members. It would have been understandable if young members would shy away from interacting with more mature members because every new generation usually has mixed feelings about people who remind them of their parents and grandparents whose orbit they have just escaped.
But on LinkedIn, the engagement level for personalities past 50 is high even among young individuals. Proof is that Francis Kong, a senior citizen, is the member with the most number of engagements in the Philippine LinkedIn community. It means young people are willing to listen to his age-old insights and words of wisdom. And why not? As an old English proverb says: “There’s many a good tune played on an old fiddle.”
In fact this mixing of the old and the young should be encouraged in any community whether in business, education, public service or even religion, because both can enrich each other’s lives and careers. The truth is mature adults can have what I call a seasoning effect on the young, by offering a perspective based on life and work experience that a 30-something individual doesn’t have yet.
So I have to thank my friend for inviting me to this virtual LinkedIn event. Indeed as the blurb outs it, it is a recognition and a celebration. And most importantly, I found a community that would embrace me warmly, even in advanced maturity, as a member.
They say that the world will continuously change because of what has happened and what is happening. But if you are in a community of kindred spirits like LinkedIn with whom you can share your experience and learn from, the world becomes a more empowering and co-creative working environment.