Your LinkedIn profile is your professional extended digital business card. Hence, it must be updated, if you have a profile.
Try to set a timer to 5, 15 or 30 minutes and see how many of the steps below you can do. This time is probably shorter than the time you spend on browsing social media updates every day. So why not invest a bit of time in your own profile today.
The general guidance is that your LinkedIn profile should have more content than a resume that you tailor to apply for a specific job. LinkedIn gives you many opportunities to share media, make post and publish articles.
Let’s start with a basic cleaned up and update of your profile. If some of the steps are too time consuming, skip them and move on to the next one.
Step 0) Stop sharing your “profile edits”– If you don’t do this you will spam your LinkedIn connections with updates on you doing the next steps. Here is how to do it:
- Click the “Me” icon at the top of your LinkedIn page
- Select “Settings & Privacy.”
- Click on the “Privacy” tab
- Press”Change” next to “Sharing profile edits.”
- Change your preference from sharing updates with your network to not sharing them. (The change will be automatically saved.)
Step 1) Update your headline – The 120 characters that your headline can contain is the most valuable you have on LinkedIn. Use it to list the skills or key words you want to be known for. Your headline is shown on your profile, activity feed and on your posts. Your headline could look like this: “Project management | ITIL | Scrum| …” (This is the simple solution that works, you can spend days googling how to make the perfect headline)
Step 2) Update your summary – you can answer the questions: Who are you? What do you do now? What are your goals and ambitions? Remember the summary should be aligned with what you wrote in your headline.
Step 3) Update your experience – give some details on your responsibilities and results.
Step 4) Update your education – write a bit about what the education included.
Step 5) Add a professional profile photo – People should be able to recognize you when they have seen you LinkedIn profile. If you have grown a beard or changed your hairstyle significantly, you need a new photo.
Step 6) Update Skills & Endorsements – Enter your own most important skills and consider endorsing others for their skills. Remember they should be aligned with what you wrote in your headline.
Step 7) Make a short URL – Mine is https://www.linkedin.com/in/oester/. If you have not change your default URL it you will have some strange numbers in it. Here is step by step how to make you own short URL :
- Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
- Click View profile.
- On your profile page, click Edit public profile & URL on the right rail.
- Under Edit URL in the right rail, click the Edit icon next to your public profile URL.
- It will be an address that looks like www.linkedin.com/in/yourname.
- Type the last part of your new custom URL in the text box.
- Click Save.
Step 8) Ask for recommendations – consider if you have a costumer or an old boss that you can ask for a recommendation. The best opportunity to ask for a recommendation is when you have just finished a successful project or just before you leave your current job.
Step 9) Update other relevant sections on you profile.
I hope this article inspired you to improve your profile. You probably knew some of the stuff already, but it is not enough to know it, you need to do it 😉
Do you want to know more about LinkedIn?
Here are two good Danish sites I have learned a lot from: