You Can Have 20 Years of Excellent Technical Experience and Still Have a Weak LinkedIn Profile
That’s because many experienced professionals treat LinkedIn as an online employment history: job title, company, dates, done.
But recruiters increasingly use LinkedIn to search for people based on their skills and experience. The information you choose to include matters.
1. A Headline That Explains What You Actually Do
Your headline is one of the first things somebody sees. “Looking for opportunities” tells them almost nothing about your capability.
Consider something more descriptive, such as “Commissioning Manager | Oil & Gas | LNG | Power | Completions & Start-Up” or “Electrical Technician | HV/LV | Offshore | Commissioning & Maintenance”. Keep it accurate and make your professional identity immediately understandable.
2. Your Actual Discipline
Don’t make somebody work it out. Are you primarily mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, process, commissioning, completions, QA/QC, HSE, project management, construction or operations? Many professionals have worked across several disciplines, but there should still be a clear picture of where your strongest experience sits.
3. Project and Sector Context
A company name doesn’t always explain what you were working on. For important positions, identify the environment: offshore oil and gas, LNG construction and commissioning, combined-cycle power, hyperscale data centre commissioning, offshore wind, or another relevant setting.
4. What You Actually Did
A long list of employers is not the same as demonstrating experience. Under significant positions, explain your responsibilities: systems commissioned, individual responsibilities, technical interfaces, team leadership, safety responsibilities, testing or verification, handover activities and problems resolved.
5. Equipment and Systems
This is particularly important for technical professionals. Relevant terminology might include pumps, compressors, turbines and valves; HV/LV, switchgear, transformers and UPS; DCS, PLC, ESD, fire and gas; or systemisation, walkdowns, completions systems, punch management, energisation and start-up.
Only include things you genuinely have experience with. Specificity is useful. Keyword dumping isn’t.
6. Project Phases
The phase of a project can tell someone a great deal about your experience. Make visible whether you have worked in FEED, construction, mechanical completion, pre-commissioning, commissioning, start-up, operations, shutdowns or decommissioning.
7. Relevant Skills
Don’t leave your Skills section as a collection of random terms added ten years ago. Review it, remove irrelevant items and add skills that accurately represent your current capability. Where appropriate, associate those skills with the roles in which you actually used them.
8. Qualifications and Certifications
Keep important professional qualifications visible. Depending on your role, that could include trade or engineering qualifications, inspection certifications, offshore certification, electrical authorisations, safety qualifications and specialist technical training.
Remember: a certificate demonstrates training. Your experience should demonstrate competence.
9. Location and Mobility
Recruiters frequently need to establish where someone is based and whether a role is geographically realistic. Keep your location current. If international mobility, rotation or relocation is important to your career, make that clear somewhere appropriate without publishing unnecessary personal information.
10. A Profile That Matches Your CV
Compare your LinkedIn profile with your current CV. Do the employment dates broadly align? Are your major positions represented? Do both tell the same professional story? They don’t need to be identical documents, but contradictions create unnecessary questions.
Your Profile Doesn’t Need to Be Perfect
Experienced technical professionals sometimes avoid updating LinkedIn because they think they need to become content creators. You don’t. You don’t need to post every day, have thousands of connections or turn every project into a personal-brand story.
But if somebody finds you through a search, referral or mutual connection, your profile should make it easy for them to understand who you are, what you do, what you’ve worked on, what you’re good at and where your experience could fit next.
Don’t Rely on One Profile
LinkedIn is one part of your professional visibility. Energy Recruitment HUB gives energy professionals another way to build a sector-specific profile, upload their CV and make their experience available for relevant opportunities.
Create your free ERH profile, upload your latest CV and use our career tools to understand where your experience could take you next.