Enhancing Your LinkedIn Profile – Building your “About” Section - a Job Search Tip During the COVID-19 Crisis

Enhancing Your LinkedIn Profile – Building your “About” Section - a Job Search Tip During the COVID-19 Crisis

By Lauren Celano, CEO, Propel Careers

The COVID pandemic has suddenly forced millions of people to reevaluate their career options. Since the pandemic hit, numerous job seekers have contacted me asking for advice on what they can do during this time to be more proactive during their search. I thought I would share a few tips in this blog about how to develop and/or enhance your LinkedIn profile, since this is such an important part of the job search process now. 

LinkedIn is a valuable resource for job seekers. This platform allows job seekers to highlight their skills and experiences, to grow their network, to search for jobs, to research organizations that are hiring and to identify people to reach out to for informational interviews. It is important to mention that having a professional, detailed and tailored LinkedIn profile is important even if you are not looking for a job. This blog will focus on how to develop your “about” section in your LinkedIn profile. Future blogs will cover the other topics. 

Highlighting skills and experiences in the “About” section

LinkedIn provides a wonderful opportunity for you to tell your career story. You can highlight various details in your profile in order to highlight “hard skills”, i.e. techniques or tools that you have experience with and “soft skills”, i.e. skills such as collaboration, communication, and leadership. The details that you list on LinkedIn should not be just a list of everything you have ever done in every single experience. Rather, you should list “relevant details” ideally focused on the types of experiences and skills that you would like to leverage as you continue to develop your career.

One of the questions I am asked most often about LinkedIn is “which section is most important”. My response is, the “about” section. Since this is typically the first section that people read, (besides your title) and this section can be powerful. This section allows you to tell your story and engage the reader, with the goal that they will be interested to read your other sections as well.     

Below are a few tips to leverage the “about” section. 

The “about” section is a place where you can let the reader know a little about you. This section is particularly important for people in the following categories (1) anyone out of work and (2) anyone who is in a natural transition point – i.e. a student or fellow. As you write details about yourself, keep in mind that you also have the potential to empower the reader to “help you”. 

Anyone out of work is probably looking for their next role. Therefore they should indicate in the about section, what they may be looking for next so that people who read their profile can let them know about potential opportunities. By definition, anyone who is a student needs to do something after they graduate and anyone who is in a role such as a fellowship needs to find a role after their fellowship ends. Therefore, they should also feel comfortable being open about what they are looking for next in this section.

Some of you reading this might be thinking – “oh no ,I don’t know what I want to do exactly in my next role”. If this is the case, instead of writing something so specific as, “I am looking for a role as a medical writer”, you could write something that highlights the skills/experience you would like to use in your next role, such as “I am looking for a role where I can use my cancer background, data visualization skills and communication experiences to engage with various stakeholders (clinicians, patients, etc) to educate them on disease information. These details would still provide the reader of your profile with useful insight into your career interests. 

The details in your summary section should be tailored to your career interests. A simple example of this would be the following scenario. 

 A researcher who has a broad scientific background is looking to develop their “about” section. They have performed both in vitro (cell culture) and bioinformatics (computational) work in many of their roles. For their next role, they want to focus only on computational roles. Since this is the case, their “about” section (and a majority of their LinkedIn profile) should emphasize their computational skills and experiences much more than their in vitro skills experiences.  

  The level of detail you add into your profile is chosen by you – you can be as specific or vague as you would like to be. Its your profile, you own it.

Here are a few sentences from the About section that I pulled from a few LinkedIn profiles in order to show how “personal you could get”

Profile 1: One profile I recently came across started with the following sentences. This person is interested in a research career focused on immunology as it relates to metabolic diseases. 

 Obesity has been a major condition in my family and is the reason that my three sisters underwent bariatric surgery when they were children. Learning immunology, I became fascinated by the role of the immune system in obesity and its related pathologies. As I near the end of my Ph.D., I am eager to contribute to the develop of novel therapeutics to make a difference in the lives of patients.

In the 2nd paragraph of the about section, this person then shares more details about their specific technical and soft skills.

Profile 2: Another about section starts off like this. 

I've loved computers for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories involve "helping" my dad with his computer work. Many years have passed, and while my relationship with computers has developed and expanded, I'm still as excited by new technology as I was when I was a little kid.

The 2nd 3rd paragraphs of this person’s about section, then goes into more detail regarding the various computer programs and programming languages he has used and for what applications. He also highlights various novel technologies and approaches he has both used and developed during his career so far.

Profile 3: Here is part of an about section for a postdoctoral fellow with a passion for cancer work and team based environments 

I decided to work in oncology after witnessing my uncle's unsuccessful battle against glioblastoma. I strongly believe that my dedication, determination and incessant hard work have been strong pillars of my success so far.

Handling multiple multifaceted projects simultaneously has made efficient at multitasking and time-management. I love presenting, educating and interacting with diverse audiences and have been able to present at > 15 national and international conferences and teach > 10 classes during my graduate work. I truly value establishing and maintaining strong and long term relationships. During my career so far, I have been instrumental in nurturing and coordinating key scientific cross-organizational collaborations leading to novel insights for cancer pathways. In addition, I consider myself fortunate to work with people from diverse backgrounds as it provides ample opportunities to learn something new. 

I am hoping these profiles provide you with a few insights to develop or enhance yours. Stay tuned for future blogs covering other aspects to leverage LinkedIn.

About this blog series:

This is a very uncertain time and many people are anxious, especially people who find themselves in an active job search. Many people feel helpless and are unsure of what to do during this time especially when it comes to making their job search productive. Every year, I provide advice to thousands of people, directly through my career coaching activities and also through the recruiting activities I am involved in. I am privileged to have a unique perspective into both the “job seeker” and the “organization looking to hire”. 

This blog is part of a series of blogs that I am writing to provide advice to help people prepare for and conduct a job search. A link to other blogs in this series is here:

 I recently wrote a blog on the importance of Self Reflection, see link, https://www.propelcareers.com/#/blog/post/20200413_09:01_content.html. 

 To see other blogs written by Propel Careers, see link: https://www.propelcareers.com/#/pages/career_advice_blogs

Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] with topics that interest you and I can try to incorporate them into future blogs.