If you’re out there in the career world or if you’re building your own business and are working to position yourself as a thought leader, you know how important LinkedIn has become. A social media channel created for professionals, it’s the best place out there to strut your professional stuff and make connections you wouldn’t normally find otherwise. From your years of experience to special projects and teams that reflect your capabilities and insight, here’s a look at five ways to update your LinkedIn profile and resume.
5 Ways to Update Your Resume and LinkedIn Profile
- Personalize with a current photo. The greatest thing about LinkedIn is that even though it’s professionally oriented, it’s still a social media channel. And, with that in mind – the social piece is very important. People do want to connect with you, they do want to get to know you and they want to look at the smiling face of another person, not the stock silhouette or something so old it doesn’t even look like you. Remember – keep your photo full of personality, but still professional – you want it to be something that reflects you, but is also perfectly representative of your pro side.
- Update with your current contact info. There’s nothing worse than finding a potential candidate or connection on LinkedIn and then quickly realizing that all of their contact information is so out of date, there’s no real way to get ahold of that individual. Don’t be that person. Double check your contact info every 6 months or every time you change jobs and be sure it’s up to date.
- Create a vanity URL. This is one of the best kept secrets you can do for your LinkedIn profile. Personalizing the URL so that it reflects your actual name makes you so much more findable in a search. Not sure how to get that done, check out instructions here.
- Add a detailed summary. You want to keep this short, sweet and to the point, but it’s also the opportunity you have to describe who you are as a professional in your field and why your experience is reflective as someone potential clients or employers would want to work with. In a nutshell, it’s your elevator speech about yourself. Remember to pull out key points and keywords related to your field or industry and give a potential connection reason to keep reading your full profile.
- Add links to rich media. Have you worked on loads of projects that would be great to display or have you been a contributing author to blog posts related to your field? Maybe you’ve been featured in a video or have been quoted in the local business journal. Whatever the case may be, this is your opportunity to show off what you actually can do and what people are getting when they make the move to work with you. If you’re updating a resume, use links to an online portfolio to showcase your projects and if you’re updating LinkedIn, upload them through the projects and add media sections.
Have you thought about updating your resume or LinkedIn profile to bring it up to current standards? These five tips will take you no time to go from outdated to completely current – what’s stopping you?
