Most of us wear more than one hat in business and on LinkedIn, we reflect this by having a number of “Current” roles on our profile. This might also include membership of business organisations, networking groups, non exec positions etc. or we may simply be using it as part of our LinkedIn Profile optimisation and hence splitting out the roles we have to help push us towards the top of the search results in LinkedIn.
Whatever our reasons, we almost certainly have one which we particularly want to be known for and which should appear at the top and then a preferred order for the others to appear. Previously on LinkedIn, we could only change that order by ‘playing’ with the start dates, as the roles were ordered purely on the basis of the start date for each role.
That is no longer the case.
Making your “Current Roles” work for you
I’ve often been asked in the LinkedIn Workshops I run, how we can change the order of our current roles to be able to display them as I want. Up until now you were only able to achieve this by changing the start date on the roles – this had a couple of obvious issues. Firstly, it is cumbersome as well as inaccurate and, secondly, it sends the wrong message about the validity of the rest of the information on the profile. While it should never be considered as an alternative online CV / Curriculum, it should still reflect reality while it promotes us and our skills or services.
However, we can now do this without any of those concerns. How? Well, visit your ‘Edit Profile’ page via the ‘Profile’ tab in the main menu and the scroll down to the Experience section on that page. If you’ve added additional sections then you may have to go a little way down the page.
Once there, hover over one of your current roles and then ‘left click’ and hold – you should now be able to drag that particular role to where you would like it to be in the sequence and place it there. There’s no ‘Save’ required so if you now refresh the screen, you should see the new order displayed in your overview section at the top. Easy.
Change the order of Recommendations too
As an added bonus, LinkedIn hasn’t stopped there – for the past few months, the recommendations displayed on our profile have been in chronological order, fine under most circumstances, but not giving us the chance to use them to best effect.
Well, now you can help the ones that you consider most relevant or useful or most recent to the top. You can do this is the same way as your “Current Roles” by scrolling down to the ‘Recommendations’ section and then dragging and dropping them into the order required, still by role though.
This may only seem like a small change on LinkedIn’s part but it has been long awaited and is one which, used properly, will really help you to make the most of both your recommendations and the current roles on your LinkedIn profile.
