The scientists who’ve cracked professional networking

“I’m not looking to go viral,” says Sharon Obasi of her use of LinkedIn. “I’m looking just to be authentic, make connections and see how other people are approaching similar topics.”

Obasi, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, started using the global professional social-networking site more in the past few years as she took on extra administrative responsibilities in her department. “It was really a chance for me to find people who are in similar roles, in small institutions — a way to find community. But once I started posting and interacting, I realized it was much more than that,” she says. “I call it my 24/7, 365 scientific conference. It’s a really great way to engage in science and scholarship in a much more public way.”

Obasi is one of around one billion registered users of LinkedIn, which turned 22 years old in May. The platform is becoming increasingly popular, with some attributing its recent growth to the decline of the social-media platform X, which shed 11 million users in the European Union alone between October 2024 and March 2025.

Nature’s Careers team spoke to Obasi and seven other researchers about why they love LinkedIn, and how other scientists can use it to their advantage.

Getting started

Teaching researchers how to use LinkedIn is part of Hannah Roberts’s role as a careers coach in Macclesfield, UK. She specializes in helping women who work in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, many of whom have little time to focus on career-development activities, she says. Roberts, who completed a PhD in chemistry in 2011 at the University of Manchester, UK, surveyed 3,000 women about their careers and found that 85% could benefit from using LinkedIn more. To use it to its full potential, Roberts says, people should have more than 1,000 contacts, and to get there, they need to be “intentional about evolving their network”.

To do so, Roberts recommends that researchers devote an hour per week to career-development activities, and make a special effort on LinkedIn as part of this (see ‘Six LinkedIn lessons from those in the know’). She suggests: “Set a timer for 15 minutes and connect with ten relevant people for your next job step”, whether that be making partnerships, finding collaborators or raising your profile to help secure future roles.

Seasoned users offer their top tips for getting the best out of the professional-networking platform.

Six LinkedIn lessons from those in the know

Select a short-term aim

“Pick a strategy for the next six months,” advises science-careers coach Hannah Roberts, who is based in Macclesfield, UK. Maybe it’s to get a job or to find collaborators. You don’t have to stick with it forever, just choose what feels right for now.

Update your profile

Your personal page on LinkedIn is what potential collaborators and employers will see. “Ensure that all the sections of your LinkedIn profile are complete and up to date,” says Roberts.

Curate your connections

Follow people who are relevant to your line of work, but be judicious about who you connect with, says Ruth Gotian, chief learning officer and an educator in anaesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. Those connections determine what shows up in your feed, she says, “If I’m randomly connecting with people, that’s a problem — because garbage in, garbage out.”

Be consistent

Investing time on the site will pay dividends. For some, this means scheduling posts to ensure a regular output. For Elena Hoffer, who runs a professional-resources business in Stockholm, it means wading into conversations on her posts. “Don’t post and ghost,” she suggests. “When I post, I always comment in the first hour, just to get the discussion going.”

Be brave

“Putting yourself out there” is key on LinkedIn, says Sharon Obasi, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska at Kearney — although this is something scientists aren’t always trained to do. Remember that your input is valuable, even in discussions with luminaries in your field. “You might have a perspective that is not amplified or not centred — you might have an unusual take.”

Connect thoughtfully

When connecting with someone you don’t know, try to build a relationship before asking for anything. “I get a lot of direct messages from people who I have no rapport with. Nothing has been built up, and instantly they will ping me a message about something that’s irrelevant, or ask me for a job,” says Roberts. “It’s a bit like jumping to ‘will you marry me?’ before we’ve even exchanged a word.”

She also suggests commenting on five posts each week, so that “people see your name, your picture and your LinkedIn headline”, adding: “If you’re employing that strategy every time you go on LinkedIn, you can massively extend that network in a short space of time. Consistency of action makes a big change.”

Once you’ve built up a strong network of connections, Roberts says that more behind-the-scenes networking can begin, including informal conversations and making yourself known to organizations that interest you the most.

Some people take a less-formal approach. Elena Hoffer co-founded the firm Alma.Me, in Stockholm, to help early-career researchers to transition out of academia. Hoffer, who has a PhD in medical sciences from the Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden, and more than 100,000 LinkedIn followers says: “I always say, ‘do what fits you’. I never plan my content… I just need to feel it, you know?”

Ruth Gotian, whose 2022 book The Success Factor investigates how to achieve peak business performance based on her discussions with astronauts and Nobel laureates, doesn’t recommend setting yourself targets for LinkedIn activity. Instead, she suggests fitting it in where you can around your existing work: “I tell people to definitely do it during their non-peak performance hours,” says Gotian, chief learning officer and an educator in anaesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.

How to network on LinkedIn

“Networking is so weird, because it’s awkward,” says Vanesa Ayala-Núñez, an oncology researcher at the St Gallen branch of Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology. “It’s not so easy to connect with someone who you don’t know.” To get around this, Ayala-Núñez sought common ground. As a Mexican, she says, speaking to other Europe-based Latin American women at science conferences and networking events “opened a lot of doors for me, because immediately you create a connection with this person — we have a lot of things in common. We have gone through a lot of similar experiences”.

She mirrored this approach on LinkedIn, being guided by people’s names, or where they studied. Writing messages to potential connections in Spanish and highlighting the things they had in common helped Ayala-Núñez to build a strong professional network. “You never know who can eventually help you,” she says.

Gotian’s approach is similar. “To me, LinkedIn is like air,” she says. “I use it all the time. If I’m going to meet with someone, I need some background information, and the first place I go to is LinkedIn, because what I want to do immediately is establish a connection with someone.” She might find common ground on the basis of someone’s education, hometown or work history, “and that just kicks the conversation off”.

Gotian emphasizes that developing personal connections is key to professional networking. When approaching people, “you don’t want to sound like a salesperson, and you certainly don’t want to sound transactional. You want to build a relationship. People like to work with those who they know, like and trust”.

Gotian recommends the ‘24/7/30 networking model’: “Twenty-four hours after you meet someone, you connect with them, and you do it as a personal connection. ‘It was so great chatting with you. I hope you have a great time on that ski holiday you talked about.’ Seven days later, you connect again with a thoughtful comment.” This could be sending an article about something you discussed when you met, for example.

“Then 30 days later, you’re following up”, sending your new connection an article or a podcast or mentioning a discussion you had that made you think of them. “You’re always circling back to that conversation. You have not asked for a thing. You’re just building up the ‘know, like and trust’ factor, and then obviously engaging with their content in a thoughtful way.”

This direct approach might make some researchers uncomfortable, but Gotian says it’s just like building a friendship. “Remember you’re not asking for anything. If anything, you’re helping the other person.”

Gotian cautions against using an overly serious tone. “Because if you make it too formal and stuffy, transactional and get right to business, it’s a real turn off.”

How to be authentic

So now that you’re using LinkedIn regularly, how should you act when you’re there? “You want to come through as authentically as possible,” says Lucy Lawrence, who works in science communication in London. She advises researchers to adopt a confident attitude and not to copy others’ approaches too closely. “Just because it’s working well for someone else on LinkedIn, it doesn’t mean it’s going to translate for you.” For Lawrence, who switched to science communication after completing a biomedical science degree at Nottingham Trent University, UK, in 2015, her authenticity comes from a genuine enthusiasm for the science that she writes about.

“I’m a yapper and I just really like speaking to people,” she says. Posting on her blog and on LinkedIn gave her an opportunity to talk publicly about science that she found inspiring.

“I grew my account to about 14,000 followers in three years just by being me and talking about things that I think are really interesting. Almost as if I’m talking to one of my friends: ‘Oh my God, this is really cool. Have you heard about this?’”

Being passionate about his research area also helped electrochemist Jyotisman Rath to reap benefits on LinkedIn. Rath posted daily for 100 days on topics ranging from a battery trivia challenge to sustainability, climate change, energy and the broader field of electrochemistry during his master’s degree at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Bhubaneswar, India, hoping that the daily target would help him stick to posting.

The task revealed to him just how many scientists are active on LinkedIn. “Perhaps they don’t post a lot or comment a lot, but they do definitely read people’s posts,” says Rath, who is now doing a PhD at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Daily posting enabled him to initiate conversations in comments and private messages, prompting discussion by asking others their opinions on the things he was posting about.

Rath communicated with senior figures in his research field, as well as raising his profile, which resulted in an internship with a start-up company working on innovative battery materials, something he attributes to his frequent posts. “I was able to contact them during my challenge, then they saw what I’m doing and my ideas,” he says.

Rath was also selected to join the Indian cohort of the ten-week LinkedIn Creator Accelerator Programme in 2022. It offers a small stipend and training on how to build engaged communities.

For some, being authentic means being open about your personal life, even on a platform that is considered more professional than, say, X or Instagram.

Siddharth Kankaria, a social-sciences researcher and science communicator in Kolkata, India, says LinkedIn is now his “primary social-media outlet”, making him inclined to share personal content there.

In April, he posted about doing a pop-up cafe with his cousins. The idea was to play as they did as children, running a pretend business and getting people together just for fun. The post was really successful, to his surprise. “I didn’t really expect that people would relate to it so much … that authenticity connected with a lot of people.”

Although he uses LinkedIn for work purposes — to find clients and people to work with — being genuine and honest in his posts remains important. “I don’t try to write things that are just for marketing or a pitch. It’s always things that I feel deeply about,” he says.

For example, a post about some recent health issues and their impact on his work struck a chord. “So many people responded,” he says, validating the idea that he wasn’t over-sharing, and that people connected to his honesty.

“I was sharing it because I felt that I had been disconnected from a lot of my colleagues, my networks, my friends, for about four months because of health issues,” he says, “and I really wanted to reconnect. And instead of arbitrarily saying, ‘hey, I have a new job’ or ‘I have left my job’, I really wanted to give some context.”

Nature 645, 545-547 (2025)

Shared from Nature Careers, to see the original and to find more great content visit: doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02494-x