LinkedIn

Why I'll Never Be a LinkedIn "All-Star"

LinkedIn has warned me that my failure to include education in my profile is keeping me from achieving an “all-star” ranking. As much as I love LinkedIn, I’ve left that part blank and willcontinue to do so. Here’s why.

One night, my parents came home from a dinner party in the midst of a huge fight. When people were going around the table talking about where they were educated (this one had a PhD from Harvard, that one from Yale, another, from Princeton), my mother had simply said, “the School of Hard Knocks.” This response infuriated my father, who has an advanced degree from an Ivy League university (and was so insistent on me studying every subject from particle physics to philosophy that he made the tiger mom seem downright dreamy by comparison).

At first, I thought it was funny that my mother said this. Over time, however, as the argument continued to rage and the comment was continuously thrown out as a barb whenever my father got mad, I started to really think about it. What difference did it make whether one of them went to the School of Hard Knocks and the other to an Ivy League University? I decided that as an adult, I would not talk about my own education, because I didn’t want people making judgments about me one way or the other as a result.

It's surprising, even to me, but my career has never been affected by my experimental omission. In all the years I’ve developed the adventure of my work, it has never mattered where, or even whether, I was or wasn't formally educated. I might be a high school dropout and I might have a PhD from (insert prestigious university here). I've never been asked this question as a preamble to getting work. When I decided years ago not to talk about it, I wondered if this was a realistic thing to attempt. Turns out it was. I'm not saying it doesn't matter whether or not you're educated, because that clearly does matter. I'm saying that it doesn't matter for the reasons we might think.

@RitaJKing