Jade Walters is Creating Opportunities for Students of Color on LinkedIn, Here’s How [+ Pro Tips for Gen Z]

Welcome to Breaking the Blueprint — a blog series that dives into the unique business challenges and opportunities of underrepresented business owners and entrepreneurs. Learn how they’ve grown or scaled their businesses, explored entrepreneurial ventures within their companies, or created side hustles, and how their stories can inspire and inform your own success.

Jade Walters is, easily, the Queen of Gen Z LinkedIn. And if you want to know why, taking a glance at the array of content on her early career resource platform, The Ninth Semester (also accessible through Instagram, TikTok, Apple Podcasts, and LinkedIn), will corroborate this claim.

Jade has spent the last year independently building up her LinkedIn following, making early career opportunities more visible for young professionals, specifically first generation students of color.

I had the honor and privilege of chatting (and gabbing, really) with her about pretty much everything LinkedIn-related, from developing the Ninth Semester to how Gen Z students of color can easily utilize LinkedIn as their secret weapon for securing jobs and connections.

In this article, I’ll share my takeaways from Jade’s playbook and suggestions for how emerging professionals can overcome the daunting landscapes of internships, networking, and rejection.

Let’s get into it.

Table of Contents:

How Jade Walters Helps Gen Z Get Hired

“I wanted a seat at the table… and no one would give me a seat, so I created my own table.”

When Jade and I hopped on Zoom for our conversation, one of the first things she said was that “helping Gen Z get hired” has always been the core of her mission, vision, and brand as an early career and recruitment specialist.

Of course, this authentic and steadfast commitment comes from adversities she’s faced — and overcome — all on her own.

Like much of Gen Z, Jade started on an untraditional, non-linear career path. She got her Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University in Maternal and Child Health, but once her undergrad concluded, she found herself experiencing a career pivot.

Eventually, that limbo period led to an unexpected union between personal reflections she’d already been sharing (via her personal blog, Love, Jade Carson) and her affinity for early career recruiting.

Although Jade graduated a few years ago, much of Gen Z’s attitudes around jobs, post-grad life, and overcoming the competitive job market, has not changed. If anything, anxieties have heightened, making Gen Z’s race to the finish line even more frenzied.

According to the Class of 2025 Big Dreams, Bigger Challenges Report from Handshake, 63% of upcoming graduates revealed that competition for employment contributes to feelings of pessimism.

Additionally, of students who are pessimistic about starting their careers, 54% cite concerns about job security and 45% cite concerns about insufficient benefits and compensation.

Source: Handshake

The Big Dreams, Bigger Challenges Report also revealed that going to college is (shockingly) not enough to stand out in today’s job market; students must go above and beyond to get noticed by the right employer.

62% of students are working part-time during their senior year and 61% are pursuing an internship during it, too.

Source: Handshake

Nevertheless, Walters has seen the impact of all of this data with her own eyes, specifically via her LinkedIn audience which has a (very calm) 90,000 followers. “I realized there weren’t a lot of resources for early career professionals,” she told me.

When Jade started out, she was applying to roles related to recruitment, but because of her educational and professional background, did not hear back about most of those roles.

She eventually carved her own lane in this space and has now paved the way for other early career content creators (e.g., Taylor Falls, Morgan Young) to do the same.

“I wanted to be the solution for a problem that I was having. I wanted to help others that were in my same shoes not have to struggle the way that I did,” she said.

Now, Jade dedicates most of her LinkedIn presence to sharing ways that Gen Z, specifically young professionals of color, can secure internships, grow their skill sets, and eventually get hired full-time.

How to Find Early Career Opportunities Through LinkedIn

When I asked Jade about the best ways for Gen Z to discover and acquire internships, externships, jobs, and networking opportunities, she put her answer plainly:

“I was that person who just used to log into LinkedIn to update my job experiences, talk about new accomplishments. But within the last year, I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of value in the [additional] content that people share [outside of just those things].”

These days, if you want to make the most of LinkedIn, per Jade’s advice, you’ve got to do more than just post a new job update and keep your work experiences fresh.

Here are a few of Jade’s recommendations for growing a strong community on LinkedIn:

1. Post as much as you scroll.

Jade says that you should post on LinkedIn just as often as you scroll through your feed.

“You can no longer just show up and post about your new job. You need to spend at least 15 minutes scrolling through, seeing what people are talking about, and catching up with industry facts and feelings,” she affirmed.

And she’s right. When Jade mentioned this, I was quickly reminded of my own progression on LinkedIn. When I first started taking the platform more seriously, I was simply sharing things that I thought should live on LinkedIn.

If I got a new internship? I’d post about it. If I completed a large-scale project for my college org? I was drafting an announcement as if it were a press release. It all made sense… until I saw another side of LinkedIn (aka “cool LinkedIn”).

You see, on cool LinkedIn, young people like me were talking about viral trends and sharing their one-of-a-kind perspectives on their internship experiences and all things Gen Z.

When I found this out, I was not only astounded but motivated to start doing the same. Even more so, seeing Jade’s content inspired me to start platforming my own gospel.

Now, I’m gradually working towards building a following based on creating content that speaks to all of me: my passions, humor, even what I’ve learned thus far in my (very early) career.

So, if you’re looking for ways to keep your timeline fresh and connections strong on LinkedIn, be sure to interact and engage with the app in a meaningful way. What you put in is what you get out.

Pro tip: Translating your experiences and/or advice into various kinds of content creation — whether that be short-form video content or social media design – will definitely catch eyes on LinkedIn. You just need to find your personal branding “sweet spot” and run with it. Since starting my own journey, this has looked like offering ‘#jeanius’ advice to my followers. 

2. Take advantage of self-paced education resources.

When it comes to filling in the gaps of experience or getting free learning, Jade suggests to get it in where you can fit it in.

“When I wanted to learn about early career and university recruiting, LinkedIn Learning was one of the first places I went. I was like, ‘Let me learn some realistic stuff, like, vetted by professionals.’”

Also, LinkedIn Learning is just a starting point. I cannot stress how resourceful companies like Extern and Parker Dewey are, especially for young Black/Brown professionals and students of color seeking to build up robust, real-world work experience.

Both Extern and Parker Dewey offer free access to paid short-term programs and micro-internship opportunities for college students across the country, for those enrolled in four-year institutions, community colleges, even historically Black colleges/universities (HBCUs).

All you have to do is ensure that you meet a program’s criteria and apply.