It's increasingly disappointing that sites like LinkedIn and most of the major "Career" or job application type sites continue to use or assume the "Industry" drop down has any relevance to what the person actually has done, currently does, or is looking to do. For the majority of employees, job seekers, and people just filling out a general profile (such as here on LinkedIn), It's an unanswerable field the way it's presented
This field either needs to be eliminated or fixed such that a user could be allowed to add this "Industry" option to each and every company you worked for. But yet it continues to be used as a singular entry that wraps around your entire profile. That's makes absolutely no sense to me.
There are some career paths where the industry matters, absolutely, but I would bet that 75% of the people in the workforce (and here on LinkedIn and elsewhere), the "Industry" question is totally irrelevant and misguided, if not misleading.
As a web developer, I've worked in 20 different industries over my career. Architectural, Telecommunications, Financial, Social Media, Non-Profit, Legal, Marketing, e-Commerce, Industrial, Communications, and Manufacturing
I've actually never worked in the IT industry believe it or not. But it's what I do. I've never actually worked in a Graphic Design company either but it's also what I do.
As a web developer, I don't work in any particular industry. If I say "Information and Technology Services", well that's misleading because I never really have exactly. When you work for a marketing company it's a completely different set of company goals, even as a developer, than when you work for say, an industrial or manufacturing type of company. You learn different things. There's different rules, laws, customers, users, and so on.
So to me there's a large disconnect and an attempt to define people simply by where they worked or in the type of building they worked in. Or, if the question is simply about what the user does on a computer most of the time, then the question or answer is likewise too narrow.
Most of the time I work in a text editor and upload things. What industry, exactly, is that?
The industry (no pun intended) needs to fix this "Industry" field and either eliminate it, or let the user apply it to each and every company the user has worked for to make it clear that "Industry" is not about the user, but about the company the user was employed at, and all the experiences the user was exposed to while working at that type of industry.
-E.K.Holbrook
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