New LinkedIn feature Classmates is a smarter way to connect with alumni

In addition to its new headhunting service Talent Pipeline announced today, LinkedIn also unveiled a new way to keep track of your alumni networks.

Keeping track of alumni and friends after college is a challenge. If they’re lucky, college friends get new jobs, move to all corners of the country, get married and were it not for social networks, you’d never know they married your ex. While, that particular friend you may not want to keep in contact with, there are plenty of reason to follow up with people from your alumni network. Particularly now, they can serve as a useful job-searching tool.

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Enter what LinkedIn has named “Classmates.”

“Beyond the knowledge you gained in school, your alumni network is one of the most important benefits you earned,” wrote LinkedIn director of product management Christina Allen in a blog post.

The Classmates feature allows you to see an interactive diagram of where alumni work, in what industry and where they live. You can only access alumni network data from schools that you designate on your LinkedIn profile as your own. You can also change the results by specifying a date range or graduation year. For those that do not list dates of attendance, there is a toggle called “show alumni with no graduation year listed.”

When you’ve got the results, you can see your degree of connection and you can click for a short summary of their profile.

Networking wise, you can use Classmates to find people in a specific industry and city, knowing you already have a viable connection to them. If not for networking purposes, it’s another cool way of seeing where the people with your degree are working and living.