All you need to know about the new LinkedIn Experience Design

Your unique career path is a big part of who you are today. That’s why being able to showcase your individual professional journey on LinkedIn is a great way to help you stand out to potential new connections, customers and recruiters. Keeping this in mind, the professional networking platform rolled out LinkedIn Experience Design.

Your profile is viewed up to 29 times more if you have more than one position listed in the experience section. That being said, one of the number one requests LinkedIn received when it comes to helping members tell their personal stories is to create a better way to highlight past experiences and show career movement across each role.

"We heard you and we’re excited to be rolling out a new way to highlight your career path in the experience section of your profile. The new feature automatically groups consecutive positions you’ve held at the same organization into a single section," said LinkedIn's official blog.

How does it work?

If you’ve held more than one position at same organization within one month of each other and they link to the same company page, they’re now automatically grouped. By grouping this information you can spotlight multiple roles at a specific organization, while not risking the rest of your past experience getting pushed too far down on your profile.

The new design is starting to roll out in the U.S. this week on desktop and mobile, and will be available globally to all members in the coming weeks.

While you might have already taken the time to add your experiences to your LinkedIn Profile, there are some easy tweaks you can make to better showcase your career growth.

Also Read: #SAMMIE2018: Relevance outperforms originality any day: Virginia Sharma, LinkedIn

Highlight all the roles you’ve had

• Showcasing your past experience isn’t just about highlighting 9-5 jobs you’ve held - it should include freelance work, side hustles, volunteer time, and one-off projects.

• If you have held multiple positions at a single organization, it can be a good practice to include them all on the experience portion of your profile, drawing attention to your company tenure, new responsibilities, and major achievements.  And, once your positions are grouped, your total company tenure is instantly calculated - no more adding up dates in your head to figure out how long you’ve been at a company.

To add the experience section and a position

1. Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
2. Click View profile.
3. Click Add profile section in your introduction card.
4. Under the Background dropdown, click the Add icon next to Work experience.
5. In the Add experience pop-up window, enter your information into the fields provided.
6. Click Save.

Once the Experience section has been added to your profile, you can include more positions at any time by clicking the Add icon within the Experience section, and filling out the fields provided. To edit existing experiences, tap the pencil icon.

Tell your unique career pathway story in your profile summary

So, you made a major career move within a company - a lateral shift or even a complete career 180 - and you want to make sure people see this change when they look at your profile. This is a great call-out to add to your profile summary section as you talk about your personal career journey. Plus, a summary of 40 words or more makes it more likely that you show up in search.

Because the new experience grouping feature only works if the organizations listed within your experience section link to the same company page, it’s important to make sure you select the same official company page. 

Making these small changes now to your profile will give recruiters, potential clients or connections more insight into who you are and what you do, and could increase your visibility overall.