How to write a LinkedIn profile that will work for you – Part 2

In Part 1 of How to create a LinkedIn profile that will work for you we covered:

• Key Level Strategy used to define your headline
• Profile photo
• Headline
• Twitter
• Public Profile URL
• Summary
• Specialities

Now we can move on to completing your experience, education, and the special sections that add the important detail that connects you to others.

The Best View

Your experience and education is where you provide the back up to where you are today and your specialities. When writing your experience remember that it is part of your story and aim to provide contextual links, similar language and always refer to your Key Level words.

This can prove difficult, in my own case, relating the fact that once I was a Show Jump groom to my current work can be a challenge, but remember that your history is essentially part of your unique journey, so write up all your experiences for what they are, they may well make you look interesting to someone looking in detail at your profile.

Tell a positive story by all means, but remember to be authentic. As your experience gets older, it can be a temptation to suggest that this looses relevance but you cannot predict this, so enter everything and tell your story, you never know what buttons it may press for the reader.

If you are reluctant to put some experience down in your profile, it may be your fear and your judgements; but you have no way of forecasting what the person looking for you is actually looking for. So tell your story, and tell it well!

Experience – Your jobs

You can have as many current positions as you want, just leave the end dates and tick that you are there currently and they will appear as current positions.

Be careful to avoid updating your headline, you will see here that when you are updating the jobs there is a little tick box for avoiding updating your header; use this tick box to avoid overwriting your carefully selected headline !

It can be useful to your career to include unpaid voluntary positions in organisations such as committee posts etc. In the top section of your profile, the one most visible, 3 of your current positions will appear, followed by 3 of your past positions. You can also use a special section for this in Add Sections>Volunteer Experience and Causes, but my personal preference is to see the current positions listed in the current employment section.

Your current position often presents the challenge of duplication so be careful to aim to make this section different from your Summary. The current positions are listed in order of the Start date, so your latest start date appears first. This can prove challenging to get the order in a way that you want it to appear, but it can be managed to suit you.

In the image you can see that for “Self Employed” or a voluntary organisation you would enter the details in the Company Name field. When you do this LinkedIn will show you a list of all organisations and companies registered in the Companies section of LinkedIn. If your organisation or company is unregistered OR you have no desire to register it on LinkedIn:  just TAB away from this box and LinkedIn will ask you for more details of the organisation which you can ignore. For instance there is no reason to register “Self-Employed” although you will find that it exists as a company!

If you wished to add your company or organisation to LinkedIn then this would be a great time to do that.

In the Description field you can use all the tricks you used in the Summary section, so use some graphics and up to 2000 words per job. It is also an idea to  break up large portions of text and use several paragraphs and line breaks so your details can be scanned easily.

Remember to use your Key Level words, especially in your current position, and if you can provide some additional levels of credibility by showing your Key Level words in previous positions, where you are able.

You may well find that your High – level Key Word is used more than the Mid – Level and Micro – level word, this would be normal as your career has developed, and also depends on what stage you are at in your career.

Remember you are building your story, your brand and your history; its all in public view, so be authentic.

In the future you will be developing recommendations for these positions and the people you want to recommend you will be reading what you have written, so keep that in mind when describing your achievements.

Use Home>Profile>Edit profile and then click on “add new position” by where you see Experience

Consultant positions

You can enter more than just jobs,  as it is an “experience section”.

Independent consultancies and contractors can show their experience by adding a position and choosing Consultant/Contractor/Adviser for example in the title.

This can be especially important when showing your portfolio of work as a small business or independent professional consultant.

For each company that you add to your experience, you will appear on the companies listing, that’s another useful link back to you.

When completing these experience sections you may want to be especially careful of confidentiality issues, but you could also remember that these are rich sources of recommendations.

Add Sections

This section is a very powerful addition to LinkedIn that enables you to add specific sections that provide data which will mean that when people are searching using detailed data you will have more chance of being found.

The data in this section also brings you closer to people by showing others your connection in a relevant context to them.

The functionality is relatively new (Volunteer Section launched in July 2011) and the Add Sections functionality enables you to add more details for:

• Certification
• Courses
• Honours and Awards
• Languages
• Organisations
• Projects
• Patents
• Publications
• Skills
• Test Scores
• Volunteer Experience and Causes

Each of these is added to your profile as a separate section. When you see the section visible on your profile grab the Title Bar of the section and drag it to the position on your profile where you want it to appear.

There are special requirements for each section that are self explanatory when working within a section, but you may find that you have various options as to which section you use for a particular item. I believe there are no fixed rules here as long as what you do is authentic, LinkedIn provides you flexibility to choose how to design your profile and so it is up to you to decide.

Certifications requires that you publish a Certification Name with optional Licence Number and Certification Authority which would add credibility.

Courses will link a particular course to an employment, unless you select Other from the employment drop down. Honours and Awards can also link to a particular employment if you wish.

Languages is a simple list where you choose to declare your own level of ability.

Organisations is a great section for detailing committee posts which you can relate to an employment if you wish (choose Other to avoid this). Before this section was added to LinkedIn you may have entered these details in the Experience Section as an employment and so you may need to amend this with the introduction of this new section however LinkedIn has no functionality to enable people to give you recommendations for your work at these organisations, or at the Volunteer Experience; so you may wish to consider carefully where you wish to enter this type of experience. In 2010-2011 I had two volunteer posts that I had entered in the Experience section and that I received recommendations, so I left them in place and added them as Organisations. Overkill perhaps, but I wanted to avoid any chance of removing the recommendations!

Projects enables you to specify the employment at which you undertook the project and also provide a public Project URL and add Team Members, although at the time of writing (Dec 2011) I was unable to add LinkedIn profiles only the names of others. If you are describing a project outside of work then just select Other from the drop down menu of employments and no employment will be shown. This section is most useful for adding URL links to projects you are working on, for instance I added 3 of my projects:

• Business Professionals In Malta, a LinkedIn group
• LinkedIntoMalta , a website for members of the group to publish their expert articles
• Kiva Team Malta, a Kiva lending team based in Malta

Publications give you the ability to add the Publication URL. This would be useful for self published works as well as commercially published articles.

The skills section enables you to add up to 50 skills to your profile. LinkedIn has a skills search section found under More>Skills that enables public searching of skills listed in your profile, this enables you to find the groups related to that particular skill and also the people that LinkedIn relate to that skill description. Using the Skills page on LinkedIn, you can directly add a Skill to your profile which is most useful if that Skill is already listed.

The Volunteer Experience and Causes section enables you to identify what causes you are interested in and identify multiple organisations that you support. You can also add one or more Volunteer positions at any of the organisations listed as those you support.

I can find no record of any limit to the number of section you can use on your profile, however I found that I was unable to add every section so there is possibly a limit here.

Your Education

Your Education section is not just showing off your experience, skills and education, it’s also a way for people to find you as part of a university, college or school, just like jobs, you can get recommendations here, and recommend people.

Telling your story and giving LinkedIn as much data on you as possible will mean you can be found in search listings and so that you can appear as relevant to other people. Every piece of data you add is another way for you to be found by others with similar interests, experience or history. This enables you network to expand as the data means that linkedIn is working for you to show your profile when it is relevant.

Use Home>Profile>Edit profile and then click on “add new school” by where you see Education

In Part 3 of How to write a LinkedIn profile that will work for you we will cover  Additional Information (So important!), Personal Information, Applications and Recommendations.

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