Have you noticed the changes to your LinkedIn profile?

These changes aren’t dramatic, so you might not have noticed them. Since Linkedin doesn’t roll out these changes to everyone at the same time, your profile might not show them yet.

The changes have two parts to them. One part involves the process for adding a section to your profile. The other part involves the overall format of your profile.

 

Adding a Section to Your Profile

To add a section to your profile, click on the “Add profile section” button. This button is toward the top of your profile and displays to the right of the blue “Open to” button.

When you click on this button, you will see the following options: Core, Recommended, and Additional. Within Core, you can add About, Experience, Education, and Skills sections. Most people I work with have all these sections populated. Occasionally, they haven’t created an About section or added any skills to the Skills section.

Recommended includes the Featured, Courses, and Licenses & Certifications sections. It also provides access to the process for asking someone to recommend you. Another way to ask the person is to go to their profile and click on the “More” button. Then click on “Ask for a Recommendation” and complete the template.

Additional includes the Volunteer Experience section, as well as publications, patents, projects, honors & awards, test scores, languages, organizations, and causes. These items had previously been grouped together in the Accomplishments section.

 

Changes in the Format of Your Profile

The section that used to be called the Dashboard is now divided into two sections: Analytics and Resources. These are sections only visible to you.

Analytics includes the number of views of your profile over the past 90 days; the number of views of your most recent post; and the number of times your profile appeared in search results in the past week.

Resources is the area where you can enable Creator Mode. It also provides one of the ways you can access the My Network section of your profile. The other way is to click on the words “My Network” in the menu bar.

To edit any part of a section, click on the pencil to the right of the name of the section. Then click on the pencil to the right of the title of the listing in the section that you want to edit. Make the changes and save them.

You can reorder listings in a section by clicking on the two arrows next to the pencil at the top right. Drag the item to where you want it by clicking on the four horizontal lines. Then exit the section by clicking on the arrow to the left of the name of the section

Finally, instead of having an Accomplishments section, you will see the following sections just below the Recommendations section:

  • Publications
  • Patents
  • Courses
  • Projects
  • Honors and awards
  • Test scores
  • Languages
  • Causes

 

About Joyce

Joyce Feustel helps people, especially those age 55 and up, to become more effective using social media, especially LinkedIn and Facebook. She works with business owners, business development professionals, business consultants, job seekers, and more – ranging from entrepreneurs to people in large corporations. Find her at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com.