LinkedIn: Experience Section

The experience section offers you several different ways to present your work experience.

The content on your resume is the starting point for this, but with your LinkedIn profile you have more room than with your resume, where in most cases you will want to stick to one page. There are no pages here, so add whatever experience might be of help to you. Remember, even unrelated older work experience may demonstrate a transferable skill or significant accomplishment that a future employer might find valuable.

• You can’t change the order the experience appears in (it will show the most recent first) so if you have something really recent that is unrelated you might consider not listing it so it doesn’t crowd out something more important.
• If you are past your sophomore year, any work experience from high school can be eliminated, unless it is strongly related to the field in which you want to work.
• Within each piece of your experience you also have the option to supplement the text with multimedia content, documents, hyperlinks, etc. If you have samples of your work from specific positions (presentations you created, links to websites you worked on, articles you wrote, etc.) this is a great way to showcase them within the context of the experience.
• You can look at the Projects section as well to decide which way is best to represent the experience you have. The Projects section allows you to “tag” other people on LinkedIn as contributors to your project, which can be a great way to demonstrate teamwork. Each item in the Projects section can be tied back to a work experience as well and will show up as a link at the bottom of that position.
• In terms of the content of your experience, the bullet points you have in your resume should appear word for word in LinkedIn. This isn’t to say that every job that is on your resume needs to be on LinkedIn—or vice versa—but wherever there is overlap between the two tools, the bulleted content should be identical. Some recruiters look at these areas for discrepancies in how you represent yourself.