Your LinkedIn profile is a business presentation.
I repeat:
Your LinkedIn profile is a business presentation.
As close to perfection as you can express it. A few principles:
- Write in whole sentences, please. Bulletized factoids are resume material, not a LinkedIn career narrative.
- Use “I” as the pronoun. Never third-person. Ever.
- Use the right verb tense based on the situation:
- present tense for the Headline, About and current job(s) in your Experience, current roles in Volunteer section, current Honors and Awards, etc. and
- past tense for anything in your career past.
- Use healthy, strong, intelligent verbs (not: has, was, made, did). Review this link for (just!) 185 power verbs, offered to my readers and training audiences frequently, and well-appreciated from the feedback I get.
- Be clear, concise, honest, and ethical in your claims about yourself.
- Tell your “why.” But you know that, right? If you don’t, you are not ready to write your profile.
Then get an honest member of your closest entourage to read your new draft profile for quality and clarity. Make them promise to be honest in their assessment. Accept new ideas for improvement and change.
Finally, accumulate skill endorsements and high-quality, recent recommendations that counsel the reader: you see his/her statements of “why”? Well, let me tell you how well he/she does that “why.”
Plan, execute, tweak, and amend as you change. You are changing, so embrace it and address it in your profile.
The above is the answer to a bald question in a recent Zoom session asking me how to do everything I was advising them to do?
Write, rewrite, and re-re-write again.
Make it your masterpiece!