LinkedIn’s age limit will be lowered so that teenagers can now get in on the professional networking fun .
SocialNewsDaily reports that teenagers as young as 13 will be able to start making professional connections when the site follows through with plans to drop the LinkedIn age limit from 18 to 14 in the United States and 13 everywhere else.
According to The Telegraph , this is being done “to provide students and those in the process of planning their careers with more options.”
You wouldn’t think that kids that young would even be considering their professional career just yet, but LinkedIn’s Christina Allen pointed out in a recent blog post that the site is used by 30 million recent graduates, showing that more young people are thinking about their professional lives now than ever before.
LinkedIn also probably wants to open up their user base. The social network boasts 238 million users, and they claim that they’re growing at a rate of two new users per second. Company pages have proven particularly popular, with LinkedIn also planning on extending that concept to universities.
“For the past few years, I’d watched my daughter and her friends struggle with these choices. For the most part, they were flying blind. Some knew what they wanted to study – but had no visibility into the career options that would result,” Allen said on the company’s blog.
But don’t worry about LinkedIn being overrun with fast food resumes and links to Justin Bieber YouTube videos . A spokesman for the company stressed that the site will remain a “professional network” and that it’s looking for younger users who are “forward thinkers.”
Do you think that LinkedIn’s age limit drop is wise? Sound off in the comments!
[Image: Nan Palmero ]
