Is LinkedIn Premium Career Worth it? (2021 Review)

As a social media website for professionals, many have signed up for this site to seek employment, make connections and share ideas. While the free version has all the features people need, LinkedIn Premium Career is a product that claims to enhance your experience by providing additional features that are not available in the free version. These features are supposed to help you advance your professional career. However, at a price of $30 dollars a month, it does seem like a steep purchase.

So what does LinkedIn Premium Career offer? This article will go over each LinkedIn Premium feature.

See Who Has Viewed Your Profile

When someone views your profile, you will receive a notification for it. As well, there is a dashboard where you can see statistics of profile views within a time period. With premium, you can see the list of people who have recently viewed your profile and their job titles.

Aside from satiating your curiosity, you can consider using this to your advantage. For example, if the viewer happens to be a recruiter or hiring manager, chances are, they were interested in seeing what you had to offer from your profile. The person could also be someone you were acquainted with and you can send them a connection request and a message. That way, you can expand your network and hopefully, your opportunities.

However, if you are not interested in seeking any type of opportunities or making use of any this information, this feature will not be useful to you.

InMails

Free LinkedIn users can only send messages to people who they are connected with. With premium, you can send InMails, which can be sent to anyone without needing to connect with them. The premium plan gives you 15 InMail credits. With each InMail costing 1 credit, that means you have the ability to send 15 InMails per month, but you will get refunded the credit if you get a response back.

I typically see recruiters sending InMails to me offering potential employment opportunities, but as for those seeking those opportunities, I found that most recruiters I have sent a connection request to were willing to accept my request. Therefore, if I was ever interested in having a conversation with them, I would be able to direct message them after connecting with them. In that case, no InMails were necessary. There could be that rare instance where you would need to send one first, but that has not happened to me yet.

Business Insights

You can get additional information on a company’s hiring statistics over a period of time and which schools and companies employees come from. You can also get what positions they typically hire for, This information might help you get some insight on the company’s hiring decisions, their growth and what positions are in demand, but these are just interesting facts otherwise.

Job Posting Insights

LinkedIn Premium members have access to additional job posting statistics such as how qualified they are compared to other applicants, which of their skills matched the job posting’s requirements and the education of the applicants. This is my favourite premium feature as it is good for finding how competitive a job posting is and how you would fare if you were to apply to it. Even if you are not interested in a job posting, this is a nice way to gauge how hire-able you are in a field and what skills are in demand.

Salary Insights

LinkedIn Premium members have access to salary information on careers such as:

• Base salary and total compensation of the career.
• Comparisons of salaries offered by companies that hire those positions.
• The highest paying locations for these positions.

These are great statistics for figuring out some career decisions such as negotiating salaries and figuring out where to work. With a lot of data to explore, you can learn quite a bit about careers you are interested in.

LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn has numerous courses for a variety of topics. It used to be called Lynda before it was bought by LinkedIn and rebranded. As it is a separate product, a subscription to Lynda costs 20 dollars a month. However, it is free if you are a LinkedIn Premium user.

Since LinkedIn Learning has hundreds of courses, you can learn just about anything, making LinkedIn Learning a great perk of LinkedIn Premium.

It is worth noting that many post-secondary institutions have an agreement with Linkedin Learning. Students of any institution who have such an agreement can also use LinkedIn Learning for free. If you are currently attending a post-secondary school, check with them to see if that is the case. If that is all you are looking for, then you can just access their courses for free without needing LinkedIn Premium.

Open Profile

Open Profile is an account setting that allows any LinkedIn member to send you a message free of charge, even if they are not connected to you. This could be helpful for forming potential new connections and opening up opportunities, but just like InMails, I personally do not see many situations where I would actively benefit from having an open profile. Perhaps if I was more popular, it might be useful, but that is not the case for me.

Resume Builder

LinkedIn has its own resume builder where with a click of the button, the builder will pull information from your profile and generate a resume for you. You can then edit your resume, preview it and download a copy.

There is also a feature where you can input a job title and receive recommended keywords to add to your resume to increase your chances of getting your resume past a scanner.

Although resume creation was quick and editing content was simple, I dislike the formatting and the resume that was generated. The image below is what the resume will look like when previewed and downloaded.

The formatting limits the amount of information you can put on your resume and is not well optimized. I was not able to rearrange the content of the resume nor could I go into detail about some of the content without risking the resume exceeding one page. On top of that, if I lost my LinkedIn Premium features, it would not be possible to use the resume builder again. You are definitely better off using another program to make a resume with.

Conclusion

While LinkedIn Premium Career has a few features that are pretty decent, I do not think it is worth it. LinkedIn’s free features are honestly more than enough for most users and some of the additional features may not be useful enough to justify the purchase. and you can seek alternatives to some of the website’s premium features. For example, instead of LinkedIn Learning, you can take courses on Coursera, a website with plenty of free courses which are accessible to the public. If you are interested in accessing premium features however, just consider the cost of the service and the potential payoff you will receive from purchasing premium.

If you need to experience LinkedIn Premium yourself, thankfully, you can try that or free for 30 days. Just be sure to cancel it if you decide you do not like it to avoid being charged at the end of the trial.