Expand your LinkedIn Experience section by including volunteer leadership positions past and present.

Many people include these contributions in the Volunteering Experience and/or in the Organizations sections. However, there is no reason not to include key volunteer leadership roles in the Experience section along with paid work positions. And there are many reasons to do so.

 

Benefits of Including Volunteer Leadership Roles in Your Experience Section

• When you include a volunteer leadership role in your Experience section, other members of that organization can write you recommendations for your contributions in that role.

• Recommendations are important part of your profile. They help potential HR staff, referral partners, and/or clients learn more about you. And colleagues can talk about how well you did something and how much value you add in a way that you simply can’t.

• You can showcase the skills you used in these roles when you describe the positions.

• Doing so brings these skills up to the place most people look first, so you could land your next job or client because someone looking for just that combination of skills can find them more easily in your profile.

• Including your leadership involvement with volunteer organizations brings attention to them too.

• Someone seeing what you did with an organization they are unfamiliar with may be inclined to look up that organization’s LinkedIn page or go to their website. This could lead to more people joining and/or donating to it.

• When you list a position in the Experience section a “work anniversary” message goes out to all your connections just as it does for your paid positions.

• When your connections send you a message honoring that anniversary, write them back. This simple act could lead to a conversation that could be mutually beneficial. (This is good advice for when these messages go out for your paid positions as well.)

How About You?

Do you list your major leadership roles within volunteer organizations in your Experience section? Why or why not? And if you do, do you also list them again in the Volunteering or Organizations sections. If so, which one do you use? Why?

 

About Joyce

Joyce Feustel helps people, especially those age 50 and up, become more effective using social media, especially Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter. She provides social media tutoring and training to business owners, business development professionals, authors, speakers, coaches, business consultants, job seekers, and many others. Find her at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com.