Crucial New Career Advice From LinkedIn's Billionaire Founder Reid Hoffman

This week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, we caught up with Reid Hoffman, the billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of LinkedIn, a $28 billion public company.

For the past couple years, Hoffman has been on a quest to teach the workers of the world that they need to think about their careers differently.

"The notion of a career ladder is broken," says Hoffman.

"As a student or as a young professional or even as a mid-career professional you need to look at your career like an entrepreneur looks at building a company."

For example, Hoffman told us this week: "If everyone's the entrepreneur of their own life, they also have to have a brand." To Hoffman, that means you have to use networks of people you know to burnish your band and make it discoverable. An easy first step is to use LinkedIn. Next, you can start writing blog posts, LinkedIn posts, or tweets to get attention. Finally, you should try to speak at conferences.

Hoffman also says new college graduates having a hard time figuring out what they want to do in life should attempt to solve the problem by "getting out in the world and doing things." They should pick an interest, pursue it rigorously, learn from the experience, and adapt.

To explain these notion and more, Hoffman and Ben Casnocha co-authored a book called "The Start-up of You."

Then, expanding on ideas from that book, they created a slideshow presentation for college grads called "The 3 Secrets Of Highly Successful Graduates" and allowed us to republish it here.