In this free, 60-minute training webinar, I’ll be sharing the strategies and best practices to leverage LinkedIn at every stage of your job search. Discover how to:

• Build an online profile that attracts the attention of recruiters and hiring managers
• Expand your professional network to drive more opportunities your way
• Use LinkedIn to find job leads and get your resume to the top of the applicant list
• Access the benefits of Job Seeker Premium, a brand new LinkedIn feature
• Find expert answers to your questions about LinkedIn

Register now at http://learn.linkedin.com/jobseeker!

“Does anyone know where I can get Mets/Yankees tickets?”

I knew (Stubhub.com!), so I responded right away.

Later that day I was desperately trying to remember the name of a website I’d recently heard about where you can find out which social media sites have your username available. After racking my brain, I decided to tweet the question. Within three minutes, I had the answer (www.namechk.com).

On another occasion recently, I was trying to make a decision about hiring a branding expert. After researching all over the web and feeling more confused and frustrated than ever, I decided to reach out to three business owners I trusted and ask for their opinions and referrals. Their advice was invaluable and I was finally able to make my decision.

All of these situations reminded me of the most important career growth tip you can learn:

Ask for help when you need it.

Read the rest of this post on my “College to Career” blog at MyPath.com…

At the NACE conference, I had the pleasure of meeting people in person whom I had previously only communicated with online or by phone. While I had good relationships with many of the people I knew virtually, something changes when you connect in person, waiting in an interminable Starbucks line together or sitting side-by-side on a bus to an offsite conference event. More trust is shared, relationships become a little deeper and stronger bonds are forged.

The secret to successful networking in the 21^st Century is what my friend Diane Danielson, with whom I co-wrote The Savvy Gal’s Guide to Online Networking, calls a “clicks and mix” approach: equal parts online and in-person networking.

Read the rest of this post on my “College to Career” blog at MyPath.com…

Alas, I am inside at my computer, occasionally staring out my window at the bright blue sky. And, after I finish writing, there is more inside work to be done today. I’ve just received a delivery of three brown boxes filled with file folders, storage bins, crates and plastic hangers. I have a stack of garbage bags at the ready. There are fresh batteries in my label maker.

That’s right; it’s spring cleaning time.

The truth is that I absolutely love organizing, filing, folding, purging and alphabetizing (my accountant told me I am her only client who color-codes my tax documents). Yes, I am a Virgo.

But I know that spring cleaning (or any-time-of-year cleaning) is not easy for everyone. It can be hard to let go of the old and make room for the new. But it must be done, and spring is a great time to refresh and renew every nook and cranny of your home, office, garage or any other space that needs sprucing up. It’s also a great time to spring clean your career. Here are three important ways to do that:

1. Clean your career (literally). When was the last time your organized all of your career documents, both on paper and on your computer? Take time now to toss or delete outdated versions of your resume, file past cover letters, put company information you’ve gathered into marked folders and organize that rubber-banded stack of business cards you’ve collected over the past several months. (Hint: if there’s a card whose owner you can’t remember, Google that person or check out his or her LinkedIn profile to see if you can jog your memory. If not, toss the card.)

Read the rest of this post on my “College to Career” blog at MyPath.com…

Image: ApartmentTherapy.com

More resources to help students and recent grads. While we’ve lost some bloggers and websites this year, we’ve also welcomed many helpful new resources for young professionals. I’m particularly grateful for the resources I find myself recommending over and over again, such as UrbanInterns.com, LinkedIn’s Grad Guide and Twitter lists (check out my list of career/workplace experts to follow).

University career centers serving more alumni. Resources for more experienced job seekers are growing as well — and some of that growth is coming from college career centers, which traditionally only served students. Almost every career services professional I spoke with this year mentioned the influx of alumni calling for their help. One career director at an Ivy League university told me that, for the first time ever, they’ve added a dedicated staff person to service alumni.

I think this is a great thing: as people face more career changes and job hunts, they need more resources to turn to. While I do suspect that career centers will begin charging their alums (currently the vast majority serve alumni for free), I believe this trend is here to stay. Perhaps in the future university career services will become more of a lifelong resource rather than a one-time stopover.

Students getting smarter about the pros and cons of social media. As the campus spokesperson for LinkedIn, I have a unique insight into this topic. Student participation on LinkedIn, the professional social network, is growing exponentially, and many students are learning for the first time that social networking can help them professionally. For many students, this is carrying over into the way they use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social sites. Many of these sites are still primarily social, but I’ve noticed more awareness among students that recruiters are Googling them, which means they need to be smart about what they’re putting on the web. I hope that in 2010 we see more tools that help all professionals better separate the personal from the professional online.

Ditto for employers. At the same time, recruiters are paying far more attention to social sites and trying to figure out how to use them to find entry-level candidates. Over the past year, I’ve seen companies making more strategic decisions about which social media sites to use and what policies to implement when it comes to connecting with students, vetting students and retaining young employees. We certainly have a long way to go, but 2009 should go down in the books as the first year social media became part of HR manuals and recruiting guidelines.

Wider definitions of “job” and “career.” I recently wrote a blog post that generated a lot of discussion. It was about the way careers are now more pyramid-shaped than ladder-shaped. In 2009, I’ve observed so many young people creating unique career paths through various combinations of part-time work, virtual work, freelancing, entrepreneurship, paid interning, volunteer-to-temp-to-perm and beyond. The economy is in a huge state of flux right now and the people who get creative are the ones who will get ahead.

Finally, I am so grateful to all of you who read my blog, share your comments and keep me inspired every day. Happy Thanksgiving and thank you for your ongoing support!

Please join me on Thursday, October 1 at 8:00pm Eastern for “How To Social Network To Get A Job – A Teleclass”

I will be presenting along with Brian Kurth (Career Transition Guru, Author, TV Contributor and Founder of VocationVacations) and Miriam Salpeter (Blog Author, Speaker, Career Coach and Twitter Expert).

I hope you will join us on Thursday, October 1 at 8:00pm Eastern for this exciting and informative teleclass. The cost is just $19.99.

Learn more and register here.

In our first five-minute segment, we’re answering viewer questions about finding jobs on Twitter, connecting professionally on LinkedIn and surviving when you move back home with mom and dad (hint: lay off the frozen yogurt).

Watch the video here.

Have questions you’d like us to address in future CareerTV segments? Please share in the comments section below!

As a Campus Spokesperson for LinkedIn, I am currently in the midst of facilitating a series of training webinars for college career services professionals (sign up here if you haven’t already — they are free!). I recently wrote a blog post for CollegeRecruiter.com advising career services professionals how to improve their LinkedIn profiles. Today I’ve adapted those tips for job seekers and young professionals:

As the largest and most vibrant professional social network, LinkedIn provides a wealth of opportunities for job seekers and ambitious young professionals. But LinkedIn doesn’t work unless you work it.

How can you make the most of LinkedIn? Here are some tips for creating a profile that will impress employers, colleagues, headhunters, professional association members and more:

1. Include keywords in your summary statement. The Summary portion of your profile provides a chance to share the highlights of your bio in your own words. It’s also a place to include key words and phrases that a recruiter or hiring manager might type into a search engine to find a person like you. The best place to find relevant keywords is in the job listings that appeal to you and the LinkedIn profiles of people who currently hold the kinds of positions you want. Check out LinkedIn’s Company Pages feature to search through the profiles of employees at your dream employers. And remember, it is absolutely fine — crucial, in fact — to include unpaid or volunteer work in your Summary. If you are a current student or recent grad, you can include relevant coursework and extra curricular achievements as well.

2. Write for the screen. LinkedIn, or any website for that matter, is not the place for long-form prose. Present your summary statement in short blocks of text with lots of white space. Bullet points are great, too.

3. List all experience. One of the most valuable aspects of LinkedIn is the way it connects you with former colleagues and classmates—which, as we all know, are some of our best networking contacts. It would be a shame if a long lost former colleague or classmate, who happens to be a recruiter now, couldn’t find you because you hadn’t listed that shared employment in your LinkedIn profile.

4. Collect diverse recommendations. Nothing builds credibility like third party endorsements. The most impressive LinkedIn profiles have at least one recommendation associated with each job a person has held. Think about soliciting recommendations from professors, internship coordinators and colleagues, employers, classmates with whom you shared an extra curricular activity and professional mentors.

5. Share your news frequently. The best way to stay on other people’s radar screens is to update your status on LinkedIn (the box near the top of your profile) at least once a week. Tell people about events you are attending, major projects you’ve completed, professional books you are reading, successes you are celebrating or any other news that you would tell someone at a networking reception or on a quick catch-up phone call.

Want to become a more active user of LinkedIn? Check out the LinkedIn Learning Center and, for students, the LinkedIn Grads Guide. I also recommend Guy Kawasaki’s LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover.

Here is an introduction to our conversation:

Online social networks create a whole new media paradigm through which to reach today’s graduating talent. The rapid pace of this shift, and a new world of social etiquette, has left many corporate university recruiters off on the sidelines.

In this podcast we’re joined by author, speaker, and Gen-Y expert Lindsey Pollak, as we begin to frame out an approach to social media practices that can serve recruiters in the university space.

Listen here and please join the conversation at TheUniversitySpace.com!

LinkedIn has also launched a great resource for graduating seniors (and all college students and recent grads), the ’09 Grad Guide and a discussion group featuring helpful articles, job postings and Q&As.

Here is an excerpt from my guest article, “Stop Job Hunting Like It’s 1999: Dos and Don’ts for ’09 Grads”:

Job hunting is a journey, so I’d like to begin this post by paraphrasing from my favorite movie about a journey: The Wizard of Oz: We’re not in the 20th Century anymore, Toto.

This is the sentence I find myself thinking whenever a college student says something like, “I’ve sent out, like, a hundred resumes and I still haven’t found a job!” Emailing out resumes and waiting for a response used to be a perfectly decent strategy for finding a job. Not anymore. Today’s job seekers, especially ‘09 grads job hunting in a recession, need to be more creative, more proactive and more tech savvy than ever before. We are blessed to live in a time when there are so many new job hunting tools and techniques. Take advantage!

Here are some tips: Click here to read the rest of this article on the LinkedIn Blog…