2D Animator LinkedIn Profile Guide & Tips

In today’s digital ecosystem, it pays to have a professional profile page that you can use to serve as a site for collecting all of your job materials and relevant information. This can help you supplement your resume and demo reel without overwhelming anyone looking at your job materials. It can also be a useful tool for networking and producing relevant job materials that don’t fit into a standard packet of application material, such as the content of a professional animation blog. Building an online professional profile is a great way to complement your existing job materials and make you a stronger candidate in the long term. 

How to Make a 2D Animator LinkedIn Profile

Any given professional LinkedIn profile will include some consistent materials. These include a professional headshot, an enticing cover headline, and a deeper summation of your education and work history. 2D Animators are also likely to use this space to either expand on their demo reel or link to another professional portfolio webpage.

Professional Headshot or Cover Photo

One of the first things anyone will see when visiting your LinkedIn profile is your cover photo. This means that it needs to attract attention and set the tone for the page, so you’ll want to have a professional-quality cover photo that sends the message you are hoping to send. For most pages, this means getting a professional headshot taken and using that as your cover photo. This is the easiest and most effective way to communicate to your audience that this is a professional profile rather than a personal one. There are alternative routes you can use while you wait to get a professional headshot taken, but you’ll want to avoid being overly clever with your cover photo.

Opening Statement

Your LinkedIn profile will open with a brief statement about yourself which explains who you are and what kind of animation work you will find on the LinkedIn page. This can be a summation of a standard cover letter or it can serve as an introductory preamble to your resume. It can also serve as a broad statement of purpose or collection of your present projects. There isn’t a single correct way to build an opening statement but every LinkedIn page will have one and it will be the first bit of content that a viewer sees, so you’ll want to spend time deciding exactly what you want to include.

Detailed Resume

One of the primary functions of the professional online portfolio is to store all of the information that gets cut from your resume for space. Most professionals will eventually have enough work experience and professional education and accomplishments to exceed the standard two pages of a professional resume. This means cutting content to make the resume easier for hiring managers to read. However, you don’t want to abandon all of these resume lines completely, and one way to let managers read through your entire professional history at their own pace is to put that information on a professional LinkedIn profile. This ensures that you don’t lose track of important aspects of your professional history and it provides a convenient place to direct interested parties to if they want a fuller picture of your professional qualifications.

Complete Demo Reel

Like a resume, a demo reel is likely to be shortened and customized for each job that you apply to. You don’t want to include everything you’ve ever worked on in your job materials, but you do want to construct a place where you can store all of the animations you’ve made that could go in a demo reel. This is to help you keep your own work organized in a single place and to give you a place to direct managers who want to see more of your work. This will often be a link to a dedicated demo reel webpage since LinkedIn wasn’t built with this functionality in mind, but it is crucial to at the very least link to a complete demo reel on your LinkedIn page.

Assorted LinkedIn-Specific Content

This is a catch-all, but one of the advantages of LinkedIn is that it is also a useful networking and microblogging tool. This allows users to add content, such as brief discussions of theories of animation or narratives of difficult projects, that wouldn’t easily fit into other job materials. For example, you may find a particular anecdote concerning your professional career that is too long to fit into your cover letters, so you can include it in more detail in a microblog post. Similarly, you may use a LinkedIn profile to update colleagues and other animation professionals about recent developments in your career or recent accolades you have received for your work.

5 2D Animator LinkedIn Tips

Since most people don’t have professional online profiles, building one can be somewhat of a challenge. There are many different paths you can take when building your LinkedIn profile, and below, you can read a few tips on the best ways to make the most of this supplemental aspect of your job application materials.

Don’t Leave Anything Half Done

Since a LinkedIn profile isn’t an essential part of a job application, it is tempting to treat it as the least important thing and downplay the effort you put into building one. This is fair, but you should never share an incomplete profile with a prospective client or employer. Not having a LinkedIn profile is better than sharing a profile that is in progress. For example, employers who look at your profile will notice if there is no cover photo or if there are formatting issues in the cover story and it will reflect poorly on your candidacy. Since it is unlikely that a job will require you to include a LinkedIn profile, providing a link to an incomplete profile is a problem.

Prioritize Networking

While a LinkedIn profile is an excellent tool for supplementing job materials, its primary function is as a networking tool, and it will pay long-term dividends to treat it as such. You should build your profile so that it quickly communicates to readers who you are as a professional 2D Animator, what kinds of projects you’ve worked on, and what kind of projects your skills lend themselves towards. This will allow you to find like-minded animators with whom you can network and let you build a community of colleagues who can assist one another. This can be a slow process, but it is an important aspect of becoming a successful 2D Animator. Since it is so important, you would be remiss not to take advantage of a tool like LinkedIn which is designed primarily for this kind of distanced networking.

Leave No Stone Unturned

One of the best aspects of having a professional LinkedIn profile is that it is an infinite repository for professional information and, since it isn’t essential to your job materials, doesn’t need to conform to a very strict page limit. By simply dropping a link to your profile into your resume, you can use the LinkedIn page to include a huge wealth of information that you would otherwise not want to put into your resume. This means you are encouraged to add details about your professional career, network, and history that might not otherwise be considered worth putting into your resume. Here, for example, you can go into much greater detail about some of the training seminars you took at the beginning of your 2D animation training or provide a lengthy explanation of the work you did on a major project. 

Make use of the Unique Features of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a robust platform with several unique features you will want to take advantage of when building your professional online presence. For example, LinkedIn works as a microblogging platform, allowing users to write and publish their own small articles on subjects that are relevant to them and their professional development. Knowing this, you may consider posting a few professional-sounding blog posts concerning your own theories, techniques, or ideas concerning 2D animation. This can be as simple as discussing the kinds of animators who have inspired your own work or as complicated as discussing your theories concerning modern animation practices and techniques. There is no single thing you should be doing with all of the affordances of a LinkedIn page, but you should explore the options and try to make the most out of the platform.

Get Feedback

One way to ensure that you put your best foot forward with a professional LinkedIn profile is to receive personalized feedback on your page. It is easy to read an article of advice and think you are taking the proper steps, but without someone’s eyes on the actual page, you may fall into common pitfalls. The best person you can get to look at your LinkedIn page (or any of your material) is a professional with experience in the field of animation since they are more likely to know what hiring managers are looking for in these supplemental materials. One way to get this feedback is to enroll in one of Noble Desktop’s career certificate programs. In addition to comprehensive 2D animation training, students can engage with professional instructors in one-on-one career mentorship sessions. In these sessions, students can solicit feedback on their LinkedIn pages or ask questions about the steps they should take to build the best page possible.

Learn the Skills to Become a 2D Animator at Noble Desktop

Once you’ve committed to learning the skills necessary to become a 2D Animator, Noble Desktop is available to make that dream a reality through professional skills instruction. Noble offers a wide array of 2D animation classes, available in person or online, and all of these classes are taught by expert instructors with years of on-the-job experience. This structure means that regardless of how your course is delivered, you’ll receive real-time instruction and be able to ask questions and receive personalized feedback on your work. Similarly, no matter whether you take the course in person or online, you’ll benefit from small class sizes and all of the professionalization support options, including one-on-one career mentoring in the career-certificate programs. Finally, every Noble class comes with the option for a free retake within one year, meaning that you’ll have the chance to build your portfolio and get even more hands-on experience in preparation for entering the job market.

Students interested in a career change may consider enrolling in Noble’s Motion Graphics Certificate program. This class aims to teach students how to use tools like Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro to create evocative 2D and 3D animated assets for many practical projects. In this class, students will be guided through the process of using After Effects to animate text, photos, and videos, and they will learn how to modify these animations in subtle but perceptible ways slightly. Students will also learn how to create animated images using layered Photoshop and Illustrator files (this course does not include instruction in either of these tools, they are prerequisites for taking the course). Finally, students will learn how to use Premiere Pro to edit their animated assets into video files. All this work will culminate in a series of professionalization seminars, including a portfolio-building workshop and a one-on-one mentorship session, intended to prepare students for a career as a 2D or 3D Animator.

Students who aren’t ready to make a significant career shift but do want to learn 2D animation skills may want to consider one of Noble’s many motion graphics bootcamps. These classes include the Adobe After Effects Bootcamp, which provides students with guided instruction in the use of After Effects for creating animated digital assets and the Adobe Premiere Pro Bootcamp, which teaches students how to use that program to compile their animated assets into a completed project. These courses are excellent starting points for new animators looking to learn the trade. However, they don’t provide students with any of the professionalization services offered through Noble’s career certificate programs.

Finally, students who aren’t sure that they want to start learning 2D animation but are intrigued by the possibility should consult some of Noble’s free training resources to learn more. Noble’s Learn 2D Animation page, as well as their Learn After Effects and Learn Premiere Pro page compiles a weird range of articles, free seminars and resources that students can use to help them on their 2D Animation career path. Noble also provides prospective 2D Animators with a career information hub to help them decide if a career change is right for them.