After a few years out of the workforce to care for his youngest son, Klaus Thorsen spruced up his LinkedIn profile. Not that unusual, you may think. After all, the careers networking site has more than 330m registered users. Except that Mr Thorsen is a north London carpenter hoping to find contacts and employment on a site where job titles such as “builder” are more typically used to describe someone who creates online communities than a construction worker.
Mr Thorsen admits he would never have joined LinkedIn if it were not for his partner, Karen Fugle, an executive coach to architects. “If you’re not in the corporate world it’s a big step, [it’s] baffling,” she says. That is not to say Mr Thorsen does not use technology; he is an enthusiastic Twitter user, deploying it to keep up with industry news and finds work through referrals from local websites such as Streetlife.com, a neighbourhood social network.
If LinkedIn has its way, however, more people like Mr Thorsen will become members of the site — without nudges from executive coaches — and expand the numbers beyond the throngs of accountants, lawyers and marketers already signed up, to include delivery drivers, waiters and joiners.