Lesson Introduction

Effectively showcase your past experiences to attract future opportunities. It’s crucial to highlight achievements and align past experiences to your current career goals.

The process of adding Past Experiences is very similar to adding your Current or Most Recent Experience in the previous lesson. The difference is that you’ll be adding an End Date to each experience.

Worth Repeating…

If you have held multiple positions in the same organization: Be sure to tag the same company and set the Start and End Dates as appropriate.

This will ensure your career path in the organization is shown correctly on your Experience Section.

SEO Optimization

Use keywords that are relevant to the industries and roles you are interested in. This helps your profile appear in searches by recruiters and hiring managers.

Use Consistent Formatting

Keep your profile professional and easy to read with consistent formatting.

Use bullet points, consistent past tense, and clear, concise language.

Tailor Past Experiences

Tailor past experiences to align with your future job / role aspirations.

Fox’s Expert Tips

Actively Job Hunting?

If you’re actively looking for a new role, it makes sense to align your past experiences with what recuiters are looking for today.

Go find a current LinkedIn job advertisement to identify the keywords and skills they are looking for. Then incorporate these in to you Past Experience descriptions.

Dealing With Concurrent Roles

As a former Founder and Serial Entrepreneur I had many concurrent roles for multiple brands that I founded.

 At one point my Experience Section listed 27 Experiences! This really cluttered up my Experience Section.

More mature LinkedIn users (like me) should consider whether there value in going back over 30 years if the roles don’t add to our professional narrative today.

I felt this was simply too much so I had to get ruthless and limit the concurrent roles to the ones that added value to my professional narrative.

How Far Back Do We Go?

For example, I don’t list my experience as a Recruitment Consultant with Manpower in the late 80’s, or as the National Operations Manager for Blockbuster Video in the early 90’s.

Use Action Verbs

Use 5 strong action verbs to showcase each role and impact.

Examples: Managed, Led, Developed, Increased, Designed, Implemented, Optimized.

Highlight Achievements

Focus on achievements rather than just responsibilities.

Instead of “Responsible for managing a team,” use “Led a team of 10 in a project that increased company revenue by 15% over one year.”

List at least three measurable achievements for each past experience.

Role Transitions

Explain Role Transitions and Career Changes with a simple leading statement. Example: Transitioned from Education to Corporate Training.

Focus on skills and experiences that are transferable between sectors or roles.

Showing changes in career paths in a positive and progressive manner.

Skills

Pick the Top 5 Skills associated with this each past experience.

• Click + Add Skill
• You will be presented with all of the skills you added to your Skills Section in Course Two of this series
• Tick the Top 5 Skills
• You can also add new skills if required

Fox’s Expert Tip

This is where your activity from course two really pays off.

Anymore than 5 skills will clutter your profile, but it’s up to you.

Media

You can add Media to Past Experiences in the same way you add Media to your Current Experience.

LINKS:

You can link to websites, documents, or videos.

PHOTOS / IMAGES:

The optimum size of images is 1200 pixel by 630 pixels.

Fox’s Expert Tip

I highly recommend adding links to provide tangible proof of your skills and accomplishments.

• Presentations
• Reports
• Portfolios

Conclusion

 It’s too easy to rush optimizing your Past Experience. Stop. Take the all the necessary time to optimize your Past Experience. It plays an important part in the discoverability and visibility of your LinkedIn Profile.