October 28, 2024
I’m George I’m a member of the Co-Production Collective team. As well as being involved in a number of co-production projects I’m also work on our marketing and communications. In this blog I’ll share how we co-produced our LinkedIn training session and what we learnt from this.
Since August 2023 we have been growing our LinkedIn page following and began to see that there were members of our community who have a limited or no presence on it.Even though in our 2022 end of year survey (now called Community Survey) LinkedIn came second after Twitter/X for the platform people wanted the Collective to communicate with them on. From feedback we received we knew this was because some community members didn’t know how to use it or needed some support to understand it better. Others also felt they wanted to gain better understanding of how to use it in a way that worked for them as people with lived experience. Since it has traditionally been a platform used for job hunting and ‘work related’ networking.
In June we put out a call for one member of the community who was an experienced LinkedIn user and one who was new to it to co-produce an online introductory session. We were overwhelmed by the response. Seventeen people offered to help to co-create and organise the session with us. Among then, ten were experienced LinkedIn users and seven were new to LinkedIn.
There were so many people who wanted to get involved that we decided to increase the size of the co-production group from two to six, so that we would have three people with experience of LinkedIn and three without. We did this because we felt it would help us gain more of an understanding of issues concerning our community in relation to LinkedIn. We randomly chose three people from each to ensure the group had a balance of experience and inexperience. The remaining eleven people were offered the opportunity to feed back on the session plan that the group came up with.
At our first meeting people shared why they wanted to be involved in co-producing this session and how they felt about LinkedIn. Some people were comfortable using it, some were not. Others weren’t sure how using it would be helpful in relation to co-production. We shared some slides from a LinkedIn introduction that was presented to marketing people at UCL to see if anyone found any of the content helpful. Then we used the feedback from this to think about our aims for our introductory session and what we wanted to cover.
From this discussion I drafted a document for us all to input into that outlined the audience the session should be aimed at, why we were offering it and the key areas the session could cover. We then developed a session plan that we discussed and refined at our second meeting. This was then shared with the group as well as the people who offered to review the session plan. Eight people provided their feedback. This was then further refined in discussions with Yesmin who had offered to present the session with Krisztina and George from the Collective staff team.
From co-producing the session plan with so many members of our community we were better able to understand:
This enabled us to create a session tailored to our community’s needs that included:
As a direct result of co-producing the session, we learnt what language to use that was more tailored towards and acceptable to members of our community with lived experience. For example, while many LinkedIn trainings talk about networking we talked about ‘connecting with people’.
Because we wanted the session to be interactive and allow lots of time for questions, we limited the number of spaces to 22.
The team who co-produced the session also came up with a plan for how we could best tailor it to attendees needs as well as how to evaluate it. When booking the session people were asked to fill out a short survey asking how experienced they were using LinkedIn, what they wanted to use it for as well as any difficulties or barriers they had using it so we could address them in the session.
This is what some of the community members who were involved in co-producing the training and attended the session said:
"I had the great pleasure co-producing the Collective’s introduction to LinkedIn session for the community. I have been following their great work since my postgraduate studies at UCL, and I really wanted to contribute to this inspiring initiative. This was utterly an amazing experience for me, not only did I have the opportunity to meet lovely people working on something for a good cause, but I also learned so many things in terms of using this platform for other purposes apart from job hunting and professional development. I highly recommend it to everyone looking for opportunities to connect with Co-Production Collective and engage with other people in such a great, friendly environment." - Lydia
"It was great to be involved in the coproduction of the LinkedIn session - as always, the collective sticks firmly to its values of being kind and transparent and inclusive. I felt genuinely supported in my concerns about LinkedIn and have now managed to get back on it!" -Mandy
As this session was so popular we will be running another one in the new year. We will share more information soon via our newsletter or on our LinkedIn page.
We have also taken on feedback to explore other social media channels that aren’t so ‘work-oriented’. We will keep you informed about these so can follow us on these as well.
A big thank you to Krisztina as well as all the community members who co-produced this session and supported the development of it. We also wanted to give a special thank you to Yesmin for facilitating the session with us and Chris for providing his extensive LinkedIn expertise and support. We have all learnt and continue to learn a lot from the experience.
Please join us on our LinkedIn page if you haven’t already!
Cover image photo credit: pvproductions
Photo of George by LeviLily Photography
Interested in finding out more or exploring how we could work together?
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