By Megan Stannett, Fourth Year, Cellular and Molecular Medicine
Spend five minutes scrolling LinkedIn as a student and you might start to wonder if everyone else has their career sorted. Someone is ‘thrilled to announce’ a summer internship at a global firm. Someone else is ‘honoured’ to join a leadership programme. Another post thanks a company for an ‘incredible opportunity to grow professionally.’ Doom-scroll or stalk long enough and it begins to feel like everyone around you is securing impressive roles and building vast professional networks before they’ve even finished their degrees.
But in reality, the state of the graduate job market couldn’t be more different. Competition for graduate roles is ruthless. Application processes stretch across multiple stages, automated systems filter hundreds of CVs at a time, and rejection emails are something most students have become particularly familiar with. In many industries, hundreds of candidates compete for a single role. It’s hardly surprising that students feel pressure to do everything possible to stand out.
‘Do you know anyone who has genuinely been approached by an employer through the platform – not a chatbot, not a scam message, but a real opportunity?’
LinkedIn presents itself as the solution. The platform markets itself as the place where students can network with employers, showcase achievements, and unlock opportunities. In theory, it offers a way to navigate an increasingly competitive job market. As a result, the culture that’s grown around LinkedIn now fosters a new branch of performative professionalism. Instead of simply showcasing experience, the platform encourages students to constantly broadcast their progress. Small milestones become public announcements. A short internship, attending a networking event, or even completing a training course is framed as a major professional achievement. The language used in these posts have quickly become cliché: expressions of gratitude, reflections on ‘personal growth’, and declarations about being excited for the future. When hundreds of students follow the same formula, the feed quickly fills with identical platitudes about ambition, development and opportunity. What emerges from it is an echo chamber of carefully curated success.
For students scrolling through LinkedIn, this can create the impression that everyone else is constantly moving ahead. What rarely appears on the platform are the rejected applications, the unanswered emails, or the uncertainty that most students actually experience. Instead, LinkedIn offers a polished highlight reel of achievement that can make perfectly normal progress feel like falling behind. In theory, LinkedIn is meant to empower students, whereas in practice, its culture often fuels anxiety. When every achievement is publicly announced and every connection is visible, students are constantly confronted with a stream of other people’s successes. The pressure to keep up becomes subtle but constant: gain more experience, make more connections, post more updates. Career development begins to feel less like a process of learning and more like a race for visibility.
LinkedIn culture can also turn networking into a numbers game. Students are constantly encouraged to expand their networks, adding connection after connection in the hope that visibility will translate into opportunity. But this often means connecting with near-strangers – a friend of a friend, someone you briefly met at a society event, or someone you vaguely remember from school. At that point, it’s worth asking whether these are genuine professional relationships at all, or simply performative numbers on a profile.
Behind the language of ‘networking’, something else can quietly exist too: access.
Platforms like LinkedIn can blur the line between genuine professional connections and the informal advantages that have always shaped hiring: knowing the right people, being connected to the right networks, or having a mutual contact who can open doors. For students without those existing networks, the idea that LinkedIn creates a level playing field can feel a little misleading. At the same time, many students quietly wonder how much LinkedIn networking actually works in practice. Do you know anyone who has genuinely been approached by an employer through the platform – not a chatbot, not a scam message, but a real opportunity? For most students, LinkedIn functions less as a gateway to unexpected job offers and more as a digital CV: a useful platform to display experience, but rarely the method that will actually get you hired.
There’s another problem with this culture: authenticity. Students quickly learn that there is a certain way you are expected to sound on LinkedIn. Posts follow the same structure, the same tone, and often include the same corporate jargon. Everyone becomes ‘passionate about growth’, ‘grateful for opportunities’, and ‘excited for the next step’. The result is a sea of identical personal brands. Ironically, the pressure to stand out on LinkedIn often produces the opposite result. Endless motivational buzzwords and polished success stories blur together, and individuality disappears behind the same professional script. And yet individuality and authenticity are exactly the qualities employers claim to value. The irony is, that in trying to present ourselves as employable, LinkedIn culture risks encouraging students to dull their personalities into something safe, generic and easily marketable.
Of course, LinkedIn is not entirely useless. It can be helpful for researching companies, discovering job listings, and seeing where alumni from your university have ended up. Used sensibly, it works well as a digital CV – a place to organise your experience and keep track of your professional history. But the culture surrounding the platform – particularly among students – risks exaggerating how important it really is. For students already navigating a tough graduate job market, the pressure to perform constant career success online can end up doing more harm than good. Instead of encouraging meaningful networking, LinkedIn often turns professional development into a public spectacle filled with recycled, generic statements about success.
Rebecca Le Jeune
Perhaps the most useful way to think about LinkedIn is as a tool, instead of as a measure of your worth as a future employee. Because the most important parts of building a career – developing real skills, figuring out what you actually want to do, and forming genuine relationships – rarely fit neatly into a LinkedIn post.
Featured image: Epigram / Lilja Nassar
Do you find LinkedIn useful?
