20190404.0430

In my comments yesterday, I make reference to the "professional" orientation of LinkedIN as a platform. There is a reason I have the term in scare quotes. It can have any of a number of meanings, after all. Someone who gets paid to do a thing can be called a professional at it, although that is not necessarily the only qualifier or the best one; there are people not paid for their work who are somehow still called professionals, and there are some who are paid for it who still are called amateurs. (And that term, amateur, has other meanings that are worth looking into. But that discussion would have to happen another time.)
For the platform, though, I have to think that "professional" means not only "in the workplace," but also "in an effort to get into the workplace." There's a lot of material that seems to be self-marketing, people promoting their own brands and carefully crafted (if not necessarily well crafted) workplace identities. A fair bit looks to be signals to headhunters saying "come find me and make me an offer," while another chunk looks like it's "I need to find a job; this is why I am good for it." Yet another chunk reads to me as "I'm already important; buy my stuff so that you can get hired and be important, too."
There's nothing wrong with that, insofar as it goes. None of it's secret, and the platform is voluntary for use; those who go onto it do so, at least in theory, knowing what they're getting into. Nor am I immune to the matter. I am not actively looking for work, having a decent job already that I like quite a bit, thank you kindly, but I am aware that the job I have might end; I mean to be ready if I have to go back out on the job market. And I remain open to the possibility, remote as it may be, that a better offer might come my way. I do not expect such a thing, though; it seems to me a kind of wishful thinking in which I dare not engage to believe that someone who needs to fill a position would go looking randomly rather than talking to friends and making specific offers or advertising and waiting for applicants, and it seems far less realistic that such a position would be a better one than what I have at the moment. (Certainly, there are things that could be better, but it's still just about the best job I've had in terms of how I'm treated and how it allows me to live.)
As I continue the works of refining my identity and of cleaning up how I present that identity on LinkedIN, where I will be admitting only of parts of myself in more overt performance than is normal for me and for most, I suppose I will have to look at that kind of thing, how I look as an employee and a possible employer (since I'll have to hire people if I remain in my position). And I shall have to wonder if that is the way in which I will be viewed most.