Now that you’ve created an effective tagline (see part 1), it’s time to examine your summary and background sections as these reflect who you are professionally.

Your summary  should spotlight your strengths and the services that you can provide to a future employer or costumer.

It’s also important that your profile summary describes your accomplishments in a quantifiable and measurable way.

Example: Developed bioassays that currently are used as the gold standard in vaccine development, Consult for the following clients: multiple institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), DoD (Walter Reed Army Medical Center/WRAMC, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research/WRAIR), MedImmune, Digene, Celera, Human Genome Sciences, Inova Health System, Kaiser Permanente, MedStar, Georgetown University Hospital and many more. If you are interested in my expertise in vaccine bioassay development please contact me at Johnsmith@email.com

Include a call to action and your contact information in your summary and background.

A call to action is the “point” of someone staying on your LinkedIn page.  It is the marketing messages or the thing you want your audience to do.

If you are looking for a specific position or type of collaboration, then indicate that with your email address.

Make sure you use keywords that describe your specialty throughout your summary. These keywords are what collaborators, recruiters, and other LinkedIn users will use to find you.

We  have mentioned keywords a couple of times now, which leads us to the question.

So, what are keywords?

Keywords are words or phrases that an individual and/or employer uses to search for a candidate that has the skills, products or services for which he/she is looking. When listing these keywords in your summary, make sure to list them comma separated rather than in complete sentences.  For example: Expertise in project management, technical writing, science communications, medical writing, and freelance writing.

If recruiters are looking for technical writers, they may search “technical writing” in the LinkedIn search bar. If you have that keyword listed throughout your profile, you should come up at the top of their search.

Once you have a strong summary section, make sure you add data to the other sections that are available including: publications, honors and awards, special projects, collaborations, additional information, languages, and personal interests.

Next post will be all about that LinkedIn profile picture “say cheese”