LinkedIn Immigrants: The most experienced executives in the market — and the most transparent in it

The author is a co-founder of G-CMO.COM, a community of global CMOs in Israel, a senior consultant, and a lecturer in the MBA program at the Hebrew University.

The LinkedIn Advantage program, in partnership with LinkedIn and led by Tomer Zucker, opens on October 18.

I immigrated to Israel at the age of seven. Within a few months, I understood the rule: those who do not speak the language of the place remain on the outside. It doesn't matter how smart he is. It doesn't matter how talented she is.

So I learned the language. Then the codes. Then what was between the lines.

In recent years, I feel like an immigrant again. This time in a country called LinkedIn. And I am definitely not alone.

A whole generation with an expired passport

There is a generation of executives I call "LinkedIn Immigrants." Twenty years of career or more in the real world. They built brands, companies, entire categories. They did the things themselves; they didn't write posts about them.

Now they open the feed, see a 28-year-old with "Five lessons from my exit," and say to themselves: this is not for me.

Until one day, it is for them.

A manager finishes a seven-year role, enters her profile for the first time in a decade, and discovers there is nothing there. One line with a job title, and silence underneath. The personal brand has ceased to be a "nice to have." It has become a survival condition.

And it is no longer just personal.

"What has changed in the last year is not the size of the network but its role," says Tomer Zucker, a strategic marketing consultant and LinkedIn expert. "The presence of executives today directly affects how the company appears on Google and in AI engines."

In other words, CMOs or other executives who are absent from the network are not only hurting their careers. They are erasing an asset from the balance sheet of the company they work for.

They are a-f-r-a-i-d

In the G-CMO community, we see this layer up close. My partner, Shiri Grossbard, held hundreds of conversations with senior marketing managers and returned with one sentence: behind almost every "I don't have time for LinkedIn" hides "I am afraid."

Not fear of writing. Fear of exposure, of criticism, of indifference — and above all, of what people in the professional environment will say. This is the part that no one admits to in a management meeting.

This is why we opened the program for executives only, in partnership with LinkedIn. Not because there is a lack of content about LinkedIn on the internet; there is plenty. But because an executive will not learn a new language in front of an audience they need to impress. They will only learn it in a closed room, with people of the exact same status, who are also starting from scratch.

What I learned in the first immigration

Language is not a talent. It is a skill. And anyone who has learned a new language from scratch once knows that you can learn another one.

And precisely we, the immigrants, have an advantage over the locals. We have real stories. A whole life of doing, not of content. You just need to learn the language of the place: tell one real case instead of formulating a general conclusion, write like you speak and not like a press release, and understand that this algorithm is not mysticism.

At age seven, I had no choice. I learned because I didn't want to stay on the outside.

Today, you have no choice either. The only difference is that this time, you already know how to learn a language.