Yes, How Should You Show Your Experience On Your LinkedIn Profile?
Sometimes, as human beings, we encounter problems.
Whether these problems are physical, emotional or something out of the ordinary, these things always arise. I guess we can say “It’s a part of life” since it happens so often that our desires just don’t go our way. And boy… It’s sucks!
However, wouldn’t it be interesting to understand why some people can’t accomplish those desires while others can? Why some people always succeed at stuff they do, while others just drown themselves into an ocean of more stress?
What defines how successful you are at escaping troublesome situations? For Entry Level Engineers, how do you define what makes you good at job hunting?
Simple: Your drive. Your determination.
Check out what Google says on it…
So, in order to be the best at showing your experience (which shows how determined you were to accomplish a task given to you), you got to understand how you can extract the parts of your job that showed your willpower, resolve, strength of character (or simply your determination) to be better than the rest. This also incorporates lessons that you’ve learned from those experiences that make you more skilled at your position.
Luckily, I’m going to cheat for you and give you the 4 things you need to know to extract that experience and make your LinkedIn Profile look amazing in front of any person that reads it.
Understand “Experience”
The most important skill ever. Yes.
There have been many times where I go to someone’s profile and the experience section just tells me that they “organized, measured and were responsible for”. That means nothing…
When you are giving someone a glimpse at yourself, you have to tell them what you did. It’s like telling me you learned French, but you can’t even say “Merci”.
(Shame!)
This is why understanding how to describe your experience is the most important skill ever. It clearly defines who you are and what you know.
So, What Is Experience?
Experience is the demonstration of knowledge you’ve acquired (in a particular topic) through the time you’ve spent handling it. Simply, you are telling a person what you’ve learned through the time you’ve been working.
NOTE: It is not how much time you spend at a job!
Some people get confused about this. You could work at McDonald’s for 10 years and never learn how to handle a cash register. Does that mean you have 10 years of experience in money management because it’s McDonald’s? No.
(You would be better off working at an engineering firm… hehe.)
This also applies to when we are job hunting because we need to describe the knowledge we’ve acquired through the time we’ve spent doing something that applies to the job. If we don’t understand what we learned as a result of the time we spent at a job, we can never understand how to explain what we did.
It would just mean we did nothing, learned nothing and wasted our time for income.
So, in order to understand “experience”, you must fully understand what you did at your job, how it contributed to your (or the team’s) growth and the results that came out of it. These need to clearly be explained in both our LinkedIn Profile and our “traditional resumes”.
I have further explained this idea and how you can apply it before.
Experience Is Different From Your Resume
When you are talking about yourself, how do you describe yourself?
Imagine I came up to you and said “Worked for Ford. Invested in mechanical systems to upgrade part performance in Line Startup. Organized all part designs and folders. Calculated through Excel.”
Sounds impressive, huh?
A resume can sound really impressive. Even if all I did at that job was copy & paste numbers into Excel for the engineers to do all the work.
Do not mistake your resume as the key for you to be able to get a job.
It’s not the key. Neither is the interview or job offer.
The only thing that will get you your job is the way you present what you’ve learned during that time in your life.
For my Ford example, I can say that I did those things without lying because I would’ve constantly asked questions about mechanical systems to the engineers that worked there.
That was what I learned. Not what I did.
In the same way, your experience should never be based on your resume. The resume should be molded to fit what your experience helped you develop the most.
Which means that Experience > Resume Content.
Now, apply this to your LinkedIn profile and you get something much more than bullet points… You get a profile that shows exactly how you were molded and personally affected by the experiences you’ve gone through at your job, during your project (whether at school or home), or even when you’ve applied something you learned from a class.
Fix Your Experience To Encourage Others
Even with good information about ourselves, if the text doesn’t push the other person to say “WOW”, then something is wrong. It’s human nature to get tired of reading if there is nothing interesting inside of the content. Especially when it comes to resumes.
Recruiters/HR can sometimes read about 50+ resumes a day (on average) without skimming. Which ones will be taken out the pile for an interview? Better, how long will it take them before they get tired of looking at these resumes with no qualifications? The key is in the display.
With LinkedIn, you now have the possibility to show not just your experiences but PROOF that those experiences taught you something. By combining visual (pictures, video) with written content, you are able to connect on a much deeper level with those reviewing your profile.
Why?
Because people like cool things.
And as long as cool things exist in what you have to say about yourself (while fulfilling the requirements, of course), they can’t help but choose you over others. It just a matter of getting out the box and doing what interests us without giving thought to what others think.
Work hard. Become a boss at what you do. Then, tell them to hire you.
This kind of mentality will cause what I call the “encouragement effect”.
By driving interested ones to your profile, you are encouraging them to want more. Sometimes, I see that the same person visits my profile multiple times. This gives you an edge because they are constantly impressed by the way you (as a person) and your profile shares your story.
This means… Fix your profile. Yes, you.
Make your profile awesome! Prove to those that read your profile that it was worth the trip. However, remember that all the awesomeness starts from your experience. That drive is what will make the difference in you sharing your profile and others finding you on LinkedIn.
I’ll cover how to make your profile 100% awesome at a later time… 😉
Don’t Slack.
There are many people who think that just by having a good GPA, going to a good school or having someone who works in the industry is enough.
In some ways, it is.
However, the determining factor at who gets selected is always how good you are at what you do. If you can prove that by understanding “experience” as a whole, your level of explaining what you’ve done upgrades to a much higher level.
So, don’t slack!
My question to you is this: Is it easy to show your experience? What do you focus on? Let’s talk about it below.
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