LinkedIn is critical for professional recruitment and guidance by Careers Advisors is to create and to make certain to optimise an attractive LinkedIn profile. In November 2017 LinkedIn even added a Career Advice featurerecruitment tools for non-profit organisations such as FE/6F/AE Colleges and resources specifically for Higher Education Providers and Students. The advice they provide to Employers has two steps; Create and then Optimise a Company Page; (There is some confusion about creating an alternative School page but in 2016 these were merged into the Company page). Guidance for both Employers and Candidates is easy to find and straightforward to undertake:

• This is What Recruiters Look For on Your LinkedIn Profile; What Catches Their Eye - Or Pass You By? You Might Be Surprised (2017)
• Use LinkedIn for Recruiting Employees; Social Networking Sites Can Yield Top Qualified Talent (2018)
• LinkedIn Masterclass: Writing your summary on LinkedIn (Undated)
• How to Use LinkedIn to Full Advantage (2014)
• Improve Your LinkedIn Profile (2013)
• Recruiters Say: Avoid LinkedIn at Your Peril (2011)

Company Page Logo Specifications

In 2014 LinkedIn changed the logo specifications from 100px² to a minimum of 300px² which then stretches the pixel into horrible low quality version of the corporate logo. Also each Company Page also has a background image that when both or either are not populated looks really bad.

Design is not my speciality but technically some logos look bad because they include text, are not designed for the 1:1 aspect ratio, are saved as JPEG 'For Web' in Photoshop, are brutally cropped, have enormous amounts of padding, are not centred, have unreadable small text, use an out of date College Title and/or logo, and weirdest of all, repeat the name of the College under a logo featuring the name of the College!

That said, and to avoid being pigeonholed as a grump, there are some crackingly well designed logos specifically made for the square aspect ratio: Southport College's Logo is particularly clean, while University College Birmingham, Sir John Deane's College, and (Sir) Richard Taunton Sixth Form College use full and simplified Coats of Arms, all of which work well, and Portland College's logo, despite needing no text and less padding looks great.

For inspiration Just Creative's annual design trends report is good to look at and their 70 Page Logo Inspiration PDF is reasonably inspiring.

44No LinkedIn Account48No Logo116Old 100px² Specification Logo

Below is all 449 FE/6F/AE College Logos in alphabetical order with each presented by the live LinkedIn file or a No Logo or No LinkedIn Account PNG. The undersized files are also presented by the live LinkedIn file but with the addition of a coloured background. The percentages are pretty disheartening for the FE/6F/AE sector with 9.8% not having a LinkedIn account, 10.7% are missing a Logo, and 25.8% have had for over 3 years an old, low quality logo representing their Colleges on the 15th ranked website for traffic in the UK.

Thanks to Daniel McNeill, and George Geaboc, and Jack Hopwood for doing lots of the technical research for this report, and feel free to email Jed Keenan on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. when you have updates to this or any other reports.