LinkedIn opens up to 13-year-old UAE students

You are not too young to get serious about your career. That’s the point that popular social networking site LinkedIn is trying to make.

As per LinkedIn’s updated user agreement, the networking site is now available to students aged 13 years and older in the UAE and a host of other countries across the world.

Students, for once, are happy about it. “I never saw the point in putting age restrictions,” said a 15-year-old high school student at a popular IB curriculum school in Dubai.

“We are taught to be independent and being career-wise, should start early on,” he said, adding, “children in middle school can think and plan for themselves.”

LinkedIn, of course, agrees. “Smart, ambitious students are already thinking about their futures when they step foot into high school – where they want to go to college, what they want to study, where they want to live and work,” reads a blog on the networking site.

This follows the site’s decision last month to launch University Pages on LinkedIn, which it said was “one cornerstone of our strategy to help students at every critical milestone from campus to fulfilling, successful careers.”

This time around, with the allowing of 13-year-olds onto the networking site, LinkedIn says it wants the teens to start making informed decisions about their future careers. “We want to encourage these students to leverage the insights and connections of the millions of successful professionals on LinkedIn, so they can make the most informed decisions and start their careers off right,” the blog says.

“As we make LinkedIn available to pre-university students, we are taking steps to safeguard the experience of LinkedIn members under the age of 18, so we are implementing the following measure,” it added further.

These measures include that LinkedIn members who are minors will have different default settings to limit publicly viewable profile information and unwanted communications. There will be special routing for customer support tickets initiated by members under 18 and there is an added link to LinkedIn’s Safety Center and Family Center so that all members can easily find and access information on how to safely use the site.

However, the minimum age to be on LinkedIn varies from one country to another. In the United States, Canada, Germany, Spain, Australia and South Korea the minimum age is 14 years. You have to be 16 years’ old in The Netherlands if you want to be a LinkedIn member. It’s the highest in China, at 18 years. For all other countries, including the UAE, the age-limit is 13 years.

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