Section 11: LinkedIn
Experience Section
Most of your time will be spent editing your Experience section. Like a traditional resume, your experience is listed in chronological order, starting with your current or most recent role.
Let's start with job titles. The military undoubtedly has many job titles that are hard for civilian employers to decipher.
If recruiters and hiring managers are unable to understand what you did, it does you no good. Review your job titles and, if necessary, translate them to equivalent titles that are universally understandable.
The next step is to add a description for each role. LinkedIn provides a 2,000-character limit for each role. One mistake is to copy and paste your resume to the description section and call it good. Even worse would be leaving the experience section blank.
These are missed opportunities to expand on the bullet points from your resume. Using your resume bullet points as a starting point, walk the reader through a mini-story of each accomplishment. What was the situation? What actions did you take? How was the team better off because of your actions?
While your resume bullet points are concise and to-the-point, job descriptions on LinkedIn can be more conversational in nature. Imagine someone is still across the table and you're describing all the great things you did to them.
Finally, as with many other sections of your profile, the Experience section is another opportunity to include keywords.
Education
The Education section can list college degrees you possess. Aside from standard information like the degree level and field of study, you can also include the grade point average, activities or societies, and a description to provide additional context.
Skills that were utilized during your academic pursuits can be linked to each educational component. Additionally, you can include media, such as a scanned copy of your diploma.
Skills
There are many ways that skills can be added to your LinkedIn profile. These include in your About, Experience, Education, Licenses & Certifications and an actual Skills section. LinkedIn allows you to include up to 100 skills.
A good place to start is in your Experience section. Thinking about the new role(s) you're targeting, what skills are required that you already possess? When possible, connect your skills with previous work experience.
What skills you add and their order matters. You want to include skills relevant to your target role(s). If you're targeting project management roles, skills like project planning, stakeholder engagement, and risk management are more impactful than skills like first aid or vehicle maintenance.
When someone you're connected with visits your profile, they can "endorse" your skills. While any of your skills can be endorsed, only the top 2-3 are shown by default. These are typically the ones that others endorse, so make sure they are the ones most relevant to your job search.
Additional Sections to Consider
To further strengthen your profile, consider adding information to the following sections:
Licenses & Certifications
If you possess specific licenses or certifications that are common to your target industry, list them here. For example, if you possess Project Management Professional (PMP) and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certifications, and are targeting a Project Manager role, this is where you would list those certifications.
If you're interested in earning a license or certification in a particular field, but aren't sure where to start, you can do an online search for "Best certifications for [Career field]."
Volunteering
Volunteering is a great way to gain experience in areas outside your primary role. Keeping with the Project Manager example, maybe you volunteered to manage projects for a non-profit and want to showcase your experience. The Volunteering section is a great place to add it.
Similar to your Experience section, you can add a description to share additional context of your work. Consider adding a 1-2 sentence overview, followed by a few bullet points that capture your accomplishments.
Projects
Did you work on big projects throughout your professional experience or academic time? If so, the Projects section allows you to expand on them.
The great thing about adding them here is that you can connect them to experience or education components already listed on your profile. You can also include skills utilized or learning during these projects.
This section can be particularly helpful for careers that rely on portfolios to showcase work. Examples include software engineers, UX designers, and photographers. You can also link your projects to media, such as a GitHub account or personal website.
