It’s important to fill out the experience section of your LinkedIn profile in addition to the About section (your bio).

A lot of people think that if they have their About section filled out, then they don’t need to fill out details of the experience section.

The problem with that thinking is you’re missing out on an opportunity to:

  1. Appear in more keyword searches on LinkedIn
  2. Build more credibility, trust and clarity with your connections
  3. Showcase your past experience which helps people connect with you and give you more touchpoints and commonalities
  4. Enable you to join the alumni groups of your former educational institutions and past positions due to your association by being connected to that entity

Your Experience section focuses on your past and current positions. It’s organized in chronological order, with the newest experience at the top.

Make sure you are linked to the company page on LinkedIn.

When you add a  new position on LinkedIn, you are prompted to add the name of the company you worked for.

If they have a company page on LinkedIn, your personal profile will be linked to this company page.

You can double check if you did it right by searching for the logo that will display next to the new position. If there’s no logo either you didn’t do it right, your company doesn’t have a profile on LinkedIn or they have not uploaded a logo.

LinkedIn gives you 2000 characters to describe your responsibilities, achievements and tasks in this section. Use them all. This is a section that counts for LinkedIn’s internal search engine, so use your keywords.

Start with an overview or a summary of your experience at this particular position. Use a couple of sentences to give the reader an overview of what your job entails. Always write in the first person.

Then add your responsibilities, achievements, services. Bullet points are fine, but it shouldn’t look like a copy/paste of your website. The content you add depends on your objective.

You can also add visuals (videos, pdfs or powerpoint presentations) to your experience section to help illustrate your background and the depth and breadth of your skills.

So if you’re building a consistent presence on LinkedIn by posting content, building relationships and commenting on other connections’ posts, you also need to have a fully optimized profile and that means filling out all of the sections such as your past experience.