Lucky LinkedIn University Page administrators got a little present in their email inboxes this morning at around 10am – their school has been included in the new University Rankings from LinkedIn! Within the hour, alumni of the included schools started to receive similar emails sharing the good news about the performance of their alma mater in the ranks.

Here’s the quick version: LinkedIn has ranked universities based on the career performance of recent graduates. From the official announcement …

“we ranked schools based on how successful their recent graduates have been at landing desirable jobs”

Universities have currently been ranked across 5 career categories:

• Accounting Professional
• Finance Professionals
• Investment Bankers
• Marketers
• Software Developers

Each career category includes 25 ranked schools and from what I’ve observed, all schools that were ranked received the administrator notification and encouragement to share the good news as well as a mass notification to alumni letting them know their school had been ranked.

So where do we go from here?

If you are McGill, UofT, uWaterloo, Queen’s, Laurier, York, SFU or UBC, I’d like to propose a happy dance. You’ve got some lovely news to share and get excited about – especially on social media.

For all schools, get over to your LinkedIn University Page and make sure it has got its best foot forward and is ready for the traffic that will follow from the attention created by this announcement. LinkedIn University Pages were already a powerful platform for reaching your alumni community via LinkedIn and now with the rankings, University Decision Boards and University Finder all tied to your LinkedIn University Page, you can expect prospective student, family & friend attention on your page during the thrill of this launch and possibly on an ongoing basis if the rankings and tools for prospective students take off.

The schools listed in the Top 3 for any of the categories will get the highest visibility and have the most to celebrate today. Those listed anywhere in the Top 25 for any of the categories will get a nice bump as well but won’t be seen on the rankings landing page for Canada. Those schools that aren’t listed at all can expect several internal reply-all email threads of death discussing the subject.

I’m off to explore the Decision Boards & University Finder. Please chime in & let me know what you think about these & the rankings and how your team is responding to the latest from LinkedIn’s Higher Education Team.