Developing your online profile: A session for PhD students and early career scholars

As part of the University of Suffolk Graduate School’s Researcher Development Programme, I was asked to give a presentation to our PhD students and early career scholars about how to develop an online profile as an academic. I thought it would be useful to share the session more widely, and so a copy of the slides from that session can be downloaded here.

This all comes with the same caveat I gave to those attending this afternoon’s session: my experience is unique to me. I don’t profess to be an expert in this area and everything I present is based on my own experience and the advice given to me by my mentors and colleagues (and sometimes a result of learning the hard way). Nevertheless, I do hope some of the things covered are useful in getting early career colleagues to think about their online profle and how this can be used to promote their research and develop their careers.

The key message I tried to convey was whether you like it or not you already have an online profile - for example every journal article you have pubished is available in an online space, accessible via journal websites, through Google searches and so on. In this way early career scholars need to ensure they have some sort of control over their online profile. Part of this is about career development and self-promotion in an increasingly difficult environment for early career academics. But more fundamentally it’s about promoting your research more widely and ensuring it’s accessible.

As I said, this is all based on my experience and in no way constitutes a definitive guide, but I hope it is useful nonetheless.

Slides: Developing Your Online Profile