LinkedIn Sucks. Your Profile Doesn't Have To.
Nobody likes LinkedIn. Nobody. Fact. But, it's just one of those things you have to have. I resisted for the longest time, until eventually my boss set it as a deliverable task. "Make a LinkedIn profile, get over yourself and stop arseing around." (She didn't say any of these things.) My objections to LinkedIn were, and still are, legion. LinkedIn has no practical purpose, it doesn't DO anything to make my life better in a measurable way day to day, it's a pain in the bum to constantly maintain, and its a large deposit of personal data that I'm voluntarily dumping onto the internet which could be used against me in one way or another. However, I did begrudgingly set up an account, tweaked and prodded it into some semblance of professionalism, and now cheerfully ignore it for the majority of the year. It was only when I was helping someone else set up their own profile that I actually realised what the point of LinkedIn even is, and that I might have some half-way useful basic tips to share on how to improve your profile. It's not an exhaustive list, because LinkedIn is exhausting entity, but it's a decent start.
Put a picture of your face in the profile Photo section. I know, I know, I hate having my photo taken too. Trust me, nobody is less photogenic than me. But it is best if it is a headshot photo, and a decent one too. The one of you pissed out your mind planking on a telephone box might be cool, but it's going in front of judgey-ass gatekeepers like me, and I don't like surprises. You might be the soul of the party, but if we are going to do business I want an image that indicates you have an understanding of propriety. Your face is enough. In a hat if you must, and if you're damn ugly, like me, do it in black and white, but leave the bunny ears at home. Don't use cutesy text, pictures of your children or a landscape photo. If you really can't use your face for some reason, put an image of your product, or the company logo. Pick something clear that will be easily interpretable even when its very small; you want an icon rather than an image.
Keep your featured Skills list short and relevant. Having too many skills, courses and awards betrays insecurity about your job role, as it's clear you are hedging your bets. It makes you look immature, and like you have something to prove. Only programmers and professional marketers really seem to get anything out of this once; for everyone else, identify a few key skills and jettison the rest. Once you've added a skill to the endorsement list, you can't currently take it back off again, so don't do what I did and add hundreds thinking you could refine them back later. You can't, LinkedIn is crap, and you end up looking like a prat.
Fill in your Experience panels with a few short sentences, which, for each job, describe what you did on a day to day basis, any formalised training you received, and any accomplishments you made, such as exceeding targets or being responsible for a key deliverable. This is the time to deploy all your best acronyms and fancy business words, as this is the bit of the profile where they should actually mean something to their intended audience. You can't bullet point these sections, which is probably the biggest UX/UI oversight in the history of the universe, so making the content packed full of specialised info without turning it into buzzword soup can be a huge challenge. Use well-known acronyms and general business terms to buy you space to explain with more clarity the most esoteric or specific parts of your role to the reader. To get a good balance of clarity and brevity, it should be half-way intelligible to someone not in your industry, 90% intelligible to someone who is in your industry but not your role, and 100% clear to someone who is in your industry and also in your job role.
For your Headline, again, keep it short and to the point. Edit it obsessively until it communicates what you do, and what you can do, in ten words or less. This is hard. Ask for help if you need it.
For the Summary, there are no hard and fast rules, but for me personally, I like to cover the sector, the industry, a past achievement, a current role and also get one piece of non-job related info shoehorned in at the end, just to make you seem slightly more human. Only the top two lines are visible to a scrolling user, so it's smart to really refine your opening sentence to say as much as possible in that space and take it as your primary opportunity to give a good impression. It's not gospel, but it seems to have stood me in good stead over the years as a sort of personal elevator pitch, and it works for digital business cards such as About.me too. If you work for a corporate in a representative role, such as sales or marketing, you might want to include a short paragraph giving the background of the company in the Summary box too, to give context to what you do.
Education should list your university (if you went) your subject and your degree classification for each degree you got, BA, MA, PHd, etc. Over the age of 26, don't bother listing out your high school education, it's now ancient history, it's old news. For the youthful, do both GCSEs and A-Levels, so it doesn't look like you are hiding your GCSES, but don't worry about your AS levels. Trying to keep it short, but also not hiding any grades you bombed, is a challenging balancing act, and if you did complicated mixtures of courses, such as GCSEs, IGCSEs, GNVQs etc, you'll probably baffle and perplex your reader, as probably did their qualifications using a pointy stick and a clay tablet. You worked really hard for those qualifications, you were told they meant a lot, and now you've got them, everyone says they are worthless and doesn't give a damn, but they still expect you to have them. Welcome to being a millennial.
Interests are usually an afterthought. Pick a few interests that are relevant to your field, include the corporate accounts of the companies you've worked for previous and currently, and then never so much as glance at this section again for the rest of your life.
Activity is subjective according to your role. If you're not an industry expert or a thought leader, its probably best to leave it alone. Treat it as a loud-hailer for your most important new: new products, record sales, and sycophantic congratulations postings to people you've not seen for 15 years but who you want to keep being friends with because they are rich. It's not the place to tell everyone what you had for breakfast.
Think of LinkedIn as your shop window. It gives you credibility. Its not a social network, its a sort of sales platform, where the product is yourself and what you know. It took me a really long time to get my head around this, I always thought LinkedIn was pointless & stupid until I twigged that I was seeing it through the wrong lense. LinkedIn is your digital CV; it allows you to project competence and capability towards strangers, some of whom may never have met you in person. I use LinkedIn to record contacts, research companies, and generate sales links. It's a directory of largely static information, not a social network that needs constantly updating. LinkedIn is a passive projection of confidence: if Facebook is a short orange man running around in circles shouting "I'm a very stable genius!" then LinkedIn is the elder statesmen standing off to one side, looking directly into the camera with one eyebrow raised and saying nothing at all.
