Whether you’re a thirty-year business development professional using LinkedIn to help hit your numbers each and every quarter, just graduating from college and hoping LinkedIn will help you find your first great job, or anything in between, the Experience sections of your profile could make or break you.Image may be NSFW.
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You may be wondering where the heck are the Experience sections on my profile—all I remember seeing is a Jobs section. Well, they are one and the same.
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10 ways to spruce up your LinkedIn profile Experience sections
This is prime real estate. LinkedIn gives you 2,000 characters for every job you’ve had. Here’s how you can tell your unique branding story, include your most important keywords, and take full advantage of this section.
1. It’s more than a list. Describe job duties in a way that will explain and add interest and credibility to your story. Don’t simply list what you did. Remember—on LinkedIn you’re being compared to other people who do the same thing you do; so the goal here is to impress the reader and stand out from the crowd.
Below each experience entry you can upload media or point to websites that include:
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- Examples of your work
- Written or video testimonials
- Presentations you have made
- Descriptions and/or pictures of your products and services
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Simply click the Add media button at the bottom of the Experience entry to add documents or links.
2. What are your strengths? Be sure to include accomplishments that show your diverse experience and your ability to get important stuff done. If you can be specific with statistics and/or results, all the better.
3. Did you get promoted? Add a separate Experience entry for all promotions you received at each job. LinkedIn will then stack up the entries in a nice, tidy list so the readers can see just how and when you moved forward at that company.
4. Tie the past to the present. Highlight the traits, characteristics, responsibilities, and results from your past jobs that most closely align with your current situation. Help the reader understand how your past experience makes you a better fit today.
5. Describe the type of customers you serve/served. You could even include a killer quote from one of your clients that you extracted from either a LinkedIn recommendation or a letter of recommendation.
6. Include descriptive titles. Take advantage of all the characters available (100 max) in your Experience title. This is fertile keyword soil.
For example, one of my job titles, CEO | Social Media Trainer and Strategy Consultant (specializing in LinkedIn), I could have simply said CEO, but this is a much better description of what I do, plus the extra keywords (social media, strategy, consultant, LinkedIn) will help people find me.
7. Keywords are key. Keywords, keywords, keywords. Oh—and did I mention keywords? If you need help identifying your best keywords and understanding where to put them, download my free LinkedIn Keyword Worksheet.
8. Order is important. If you want to display multiple current jobs, like the work you are doing with your favorite nonprofit or industry association board in addition to your “day job” (I highly recommend doing this), then simply reorder the entries in your current Experience section.
Do this by clicking the up/down arrow to the right of the Experience heading and then holding down the move icon (four horizontal lines) on the right of the actual experience entry and moving up or down to the order you prefer.
9. Grammar matters. Write this section in Word, check out the character count, run spelling and grammar checks, and then save and paste into your profile.
10. Attach the most important skills to each Experience entry. This is fairly new, and you can now point (attach) specific skills from your Skills section to each Experience entry. This helps the reader know what skills you used on that specific job, but it can also help you move up in the search rankings relating to that specific skill.
You accomplish this by going to your Skills section, clicking on an individual skill, and then checking the box of the Experience entry to which you want to attach this skill.
Is there a difference between the words experience and jobs? You bet there is, and I hope you now understand how to use the Experience sections of your profile as a strategic weapon.
If you would like my professional opinion on your Experience section, as well as the rest of your profile, then take advantage of my specially priced one-hour virtual $197 LinkedIn consultation.
This consultation will take place on the phone, and I’ll share my desktop screen with you. I will perform a detailed critique of your profile and email your marked-up profile to you prior to our session. Click here to schedule your session. It will be a game-changer for you.
Here are a few comments from my recent clients:
“Great job offer received via LinkedIn only two days after consulting with Wayne!”
“My effectiveness at using LinkedIn has improved because of what I’ve learned from Wayne. I’ve literally attracted clients who’ve directly reached out to me on LinkedIn.”
Don’t miss your chance to get results like these. Book your session now by clicking here. Space is limited.
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