Today I rewrote my LinkedIn following the tutorial for Veterans. I’m not a veteran, but the video is very helpful for deciding how an introvert like me can try to connect and network on LinkedIn.
Starters
First off, I did three of the ‘don’ts’ on LinkedIn, and that’s bullet points. LinkedIn is not the same as another resume.
- Bullet Points
- Tailoring to an audience
- Acronyms and Jargon
Bullet Points
I condensed my bullet points into concise complete sentences with periods at the end. Its important to maintain the “professional” look and show off your fluency, especially in English, my native lanaguage. Writing the work description is like writing the cover letter, it needs to be to the point but also come off as interesting and not forceful. Bullet points come off as lazy, informal, and some recruiters hate it on LinkedIn, and expect to see it only in a resume where there is a set amount of space.
Audience
LinkedIn is meant to be a professional environment for employers and recruiters to look at my profile. I need to show more than technical skills. I need to write about softskills. I broke down each job into two responsibilities. A technical skill is my first responsiblity, why I was hired and what I do a majority of the time. But next, I need to write about my secondary responsibility as a Scrum Master and mentor. All in all, I wrote about my Full-Stack tasks working in the R&D team, focusing on concrete examples such as products published, promotions as a result of my mentoring, and team management.
Acronyms
I struggled with this quite a lot. Words like IoT and API just come so freely to me and I want to keep it specific instead of calling it all “software”. I ended up refering to APIs as software for data handling, and IoTs/Internet of Things as Smart Systems. I tied it back to my work in web development and operations management as tasks a general full-stack worker would be expected to handle (Frontend, Backend, Operations).
Takeways
I improved my LinkedIn profile by keeping it professional, clean, and relateable to the jobs I’m seeking. The biggest distinction is that resume’s have a set amount of space. While on LinkedIn, anyone interested enough will click learn more and want to be engaged with the author. In contrast with being bombarded by bullet points and information overload.