How to LinkedIn Better . . . Lesson 6. Your Experience

How to do LinkedIn Better. Lesson 6 – Your Experience

This is your work history.

One key thing to remember is this should not replicate your CV.

The purpose of LinkedIn for job hunting is to get people to pick up the phone to call you (also covered in Lesson 4 – contact details).

Think of this as a chain of events. . .

Someone does a search for a skillset (Lesson 1 – Your Headline) and they look at your profile. They read your ‘about’ section (Lesson 5 in this series) and then glance through your work history.

What they see there should be enough to pique their interest, so they pick up the phone and call you to talk about what you’ve done and where you’ve worked. If you replicate your CV they have no need to do this because many of their questions have been answered.

Note: Each artefact in your professional profile serves its own purpose. For example > your LinkedIn profile should lead to > a conversation which should lead to > a request for a CV . . . and so on.

So what should go in the ‘Experience’ section?

YOUR ROLE TITLE. Keep this to industry standard. . . . it may be the company you worked for called you a ‘Solution and Vision Liberation Charioteer,’ but in your profile call it a Project Manager. No-one is going to search for the former I promise you . . . though potentially some high profile govt. positions may have equally ambiguous names.

COMPANY NAME. Get it right so the company logo comes up. It looks much better than a grey box. If the company has changed its name then make sure your profile is updated.

📆 DATES. For the past 10 years:

📌 Start Month and Year

📌 Finish Month and Year

After that it’s perfectly acceptable just to put year. Let’s face it, something you did more than 10 years ago isn’t particularly pertinent/important.