How to Write Your LinkedIn Work Experience Section

Looking for a new job? The LinkedIn work experience section is an excellent way to help your LinkedIn profile stand out.

Job seekers with a strong LinkedIn “Work Experience” section have a much greater likelihood of landing the perfect opportunity in the job search. Let’s dive into how to write your LinkedIn work experience section in your LinkedIn profile to stand out to hiring managers and recruiters.

‍

How LinkedIn can help you build your digital reputation

The “Work Experience” section of your LinkedIn is one of the first things recruiters look for on your LinkedIn profile. It provides a snapshot of your professional journey, highlighting your roles, responsibilities, and achievements.

‍

Benefits of adding accomplishments to your LinkedIn Work Experience

• Increases your attractiveness to recruiters looking for people with specific skills and experiences, along with colleagues, prospects, and hiring managers.
• Speeds up your job search by helping others understand your experience and establishing authority and credibility.
• Helps you appear higher in search results. By completing your “Work Experience” section with key accomplishments, you develop a more complete profile that is likely to rank higher in LinkedIn searches.

Leah Dillion, social media manager and recruiter at Teal, specifically looks at job duties and achievements mentioned in the “Work Experience” section of LinkedIn:

“​​When I’m looking at someone’s experience section on LinkedIn, I’m looking to see if they meet the criteria of the role beyond a job title. Their job duties and achievements give me a better understanding of their scope of knowledge and specific skill sets this role needs.”

‍

Understanding the LinkedIn “Work Experience” section

The LinkedIn “Work Experience” section within your LinkedIn profile is where you showcase your professional experience and past roles. It allows you to provide detailed information about your previous work and current employment, including your title, company name, dates of employment, and key achievements.

‍

What’s the purpose of the LinkedIn experience section?

Having a detailed, up-to-date “Work Experience” section is crucial for networking and job-seeking purposes on LinkedIn. It allows you to present a comprehensive and professional summary of your career journey to potential employers and connections and substantiate your experience to increase the odds of landing an offer.

‍

What’s the difference between a resume and my LinkedIn experience?

A resume is a professional document that highlights your work experience, skills, and qualifications for a specific role. It’s typically intended for a specific role at a specific company and is tailored according to the job requirements and description.

Pro tip: Use Teal’s Resume Builder to optimize your work experience for each resume.

‍

Think of the LinkedIn “Work Experience” section as a complement to your resume. While effective resumes include only the most relevant experiences for a particular role, a LinkedIn profile can include more or all of your professional experiences. It can be more general and won't always be targeted toward a certain position.

‍

How to add work experience to your LinkedIn profile

After logging in to your LinkedIn account, click your profile picture in the top bar. Then, click “View Profile” to access your LinkedIn profile. You can also go to the left panel and click your name or profile picture there to access your profile.

Once you’ve landed on your LinkedIn profile page, you can add a position. There are two ways to add a new position:

Option 1: Add a new position from the very top of the profile. Click the “Add profile section” at the top of the profile. Under “Core,” click “Add position.”

Option 2: Scroll down to the “Experience” section. Click or tap the “+” icon, and click “Add position.”

From there, several fields will appear, inviting you to fill in the position details.

‍

Fields for LinkedIn experience entries

Each position on LinkedIn has a combination of required (*) and optional fields:

‍

Required fields for LinkedIn Work Experience entries

Title*

List your position title, including any relevant keywords. Sometimes job titles benefit from being revised for common searches.

Example: "Content Marketing Manager" might be more search-friendly than "Manager, Marketing Content."

Company name*

Many companies already have a company profile on LinkedIn and will autocomplete from the LinkedIn Company Page in the dropdown as you type.

Employment dates*

This is usually shown by a start and end date. If you’re currently working in the role, click “I am currently working in this role” and it will automatically list your end date on your profile as “Present.”

Industry*

This doesn’t display on your profile. Select the best match and keep going.

Optional fields for LinkedIn Work Experience entries

The profile gets much more interesting with the additional, optional work experience fields including:

Employment type

LinkedIn allows you to list employment type, such as Full-time, Part-time, Freelance, or Other type of opportunity.‍

Location

Sharing the location can give people reviewing your profile a sense of where you’ve worked (and where you’re likely based).

Location type

Choose from On-site, Hybrid, and Remote. Showing that you have experience working in a certain capacity can be valuable to some recruiters and employers.

Example: If you have a work history in remote roles, you may be a strong candidate for additional remote roles.

‍

Description

This is a written summary, usually two or three sentences long, that allows you to show your job duties, achievements, and expertise. By including relevant information with a few highlights and key accomplishments, you can improve your odds as a job seeker. 

Pro tip: To further optimize your LinkedIn profile, consider using ChatGPT for your LinkedIn summary.

Skills

You can link every position in your profile with relevant skills in the “Skills” section of your LinkedIn profile. This can help people identify the unique skills you used in various positions and give context to what you did in a particular role.

Media

You can add media to showcase your work, such as links, images, or documents. If you have a professional website that serves as a resume, you can create a separate portfolio section on your LinkedIn profile and include any relevant links to your work.

Once you’re done, click "Save" or "Save Changes" to update your profile with the new work experience entry. Repeat this process for any additional positions.

‍

Top 5 tips to write an effective LinkedIn profile job description

Here are five best practices for the job description sections of your LinkedIn profile:

1. Include relevant context

It’s important to provide relevant context, especially information that can be helpful to your future role, such as:

• The kinds of products you worked on or are working on now
• The size of your department
• The number of people you managed or the title of the person you reported to
• The skills you used in the role, which you can include in the “Skills” field

2. Highlight key achievements

Sharing your most significant accomplishments can give people a sense of what you accomplished and an indicator of what you may bring to future opportunities in your career. Current job responsibilities are usually listed in the present tense while past responsibilities and key achievements are usually written in the past tense.

3. Make it different from your resume

Resumes are detailed documents that show exactly what the person has done in the past that aligns with the role they’re applying for or interested in. 

LinkedIn profiles serve a much larger audience, so they can be more general and brief. They complement your resume. You can use portions of your resume when writing the LinkedIn profile but always look at the overall picture to make sure it’s enhancing your entire LinkedIn profile.

4. Highlight responsibilities and results

Listing generic responsibilities without highlighting achievements can make it more challenging for recruiters to reach out because they’ll have less information on the particular impact you’ve made. By highlighting and specifying your achievements, you build trust and excitement and increase the odds they’ll contact you.

If you’d like some help formulating your accomplishments, you can use Teal’s AI Resume Builder to write more impactful achievements that showcase your results, not just your responsibilities.

5. Include details to provide extra color

No matter what field you’re in, adding specific information can enhance your work experience descriptions. For instance, if you’re a software engineer, it might help to specify what you worked on or what kinds of programming languages you used, according to Leah Dillon, Teal recruiter and former technical recruiter at Amazon:

“If I’m hiring a backend software engineer with experience in a certain framework, I’m going to specifically be looking for that stack and framework in your work experience. Only listing a job title and tenure gives me no indication of your scope of knowledge. This is the point where I decide if I want to message them and see if they potentially have what I’m looking for or move on to the next profile.”

‍

3 LinkedIn experience description examples

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to writing the work experience section, so here are three examples that show varying degrees of complexity.

Example 1: Brief summary

Let’s start with an example from content and SEO consultant Courtney Damji. Here’s how she describes her time as a content marketing and distribution manager at Upwork.

What works well:

Courtney writes in a personable tone, describing her responsibilities overseeing the editorial roadmap, leading content distribution, and optimizing content. She specifies what she worked on (e.g., email campaigns for prospects and direct mail) which gives recruiters confidence that she has experience with these mediums. She also tags three of her key skills in the “Skills” section, which makes this easy to read.

What could be better:

Courtney has an opportunity to showcase more accomplishments here. For example, were there increases in organic traffic or conversions after optimizing the content? How well did the various marketing assets convert and what improvement did the company see because of the campaigns she ran? These are excellent opportunities to showcase the impact that compels recruiters, hiring managers, or prospects to reach out.

‍

Example 2: Contextual skills

Let’s move to a slightly longer example. This is a snapshot from the LinkedIn profile of Mike Peditto, a recruiting and hiring consultant. Here’s how he describes his time as a lead technical recruiter at OpenArc LLC.

What works well:

Mike explains the responsibilities of his role and the business areas he worked in. His past and current employers likely recognized via this section of his experience that he was going to be a strong candidate for recruiting roles, particularly technical ones.

He includes concrete skills such as the specific ATS systems he used and the specific roles for which he recruited. This demonstrates specific knowledge.

What could be better:

Mike can show the results he accomplished in his role. For example, how many candidates did he recruit? What was the acceptance rate for offers?

Mike can also connect skills to the job via the LinkedIn Skills section to help recruiters and hiring managers understand the specific capabilities and tech–JazzHR, Lever, Workday, and Taleo–he used in his role.

‍

Example 3: Achievements and responsibilities

Finally, let’s explore an example from Leah Dillon, Teal’s social media manager and recruiter.

What works well:

Leah’s responsibilities and accomplishments are clear and easy to understand. Her responsibilities include multiple hard skills, which demonstrate competence with tools and platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Notion, Canva, and CapCut.

Her achievements have strong quantitative measurements and highlight her key skills, including her ability to optimize SEO and increase follower counts.

What could be better:

It’s possible to integrate the responsibilities and achievements to shorten the section and make it more concise. Some general responsibilities could be expanded or changed to create new achievements, but this is a powerful experience section.

Related: Need examples for your summary as well? Check out these LinkedIn summary examples.

‍

How to strengthen your LinkedIn experience section with Teal

Teal’s AI Resume Builder can help you substantiate your work experience and craft achievement statements that stand out. Whether you’re new to writing about your work experience or you’re a pro who’d like a little help, Teal’s generative AI can help you speed up and customize the creation of your LinkedIn experience descriptions.

‍

Here’s a step-by-step, 5-minute walkthrough from Teal’s founder and CEO, Dave Fano:

‍

With Teal’s AI Resume Builder achievements tool, you can not only get 3 options to use as starting points every time, but you can also:

• Customize the achievements with specific keywords, such as relevant skills
• Align the achievements to specific job descriptions and bullet points
• Create custom prompts so the AI can include particular outputs, such as “time-based statements in months or years” or anything else that’s relevant

‍

Build your LinkedIn experience section with Teal’s AI Resume Builder

Teal’s AI Resume Builder can help you build a LinkedIn experience section that shines and positions you for the new role you’re looking for. Sign up and get started building a powerful and distinctive LinkedIn experience section today.

‍