Writing a Personal Summary for LinkedIn as a Student
Posted on Tuesday, July 25th, 2017
It’s the hardest part of building a LinkedIn profile, but it’s arguably the most important: it’s the personal summary. It’s the best real estate on your profile, where you have a chance to show employers your personality and tell them why your experience makes you the ideal candidate.
When you’re a student, writing your summary can feel like an uphill battle. How do you prove to employers that your experience makes you an ideal hire, when you don’t have any experience?
Fear not: you can write a memorable, professional, and powerful summary with any level of experience. Below, we look at four steps to do it.
Step One: What Makes You Special?
Industry Skills
First, think about your education. What kinds of things are you learning that make you well-suited to work in your industry?
It can be helpful to visit your program’s page on your school website. Often, these course descriptions will have skills or learning outcomes listed right there. You can then choose your top three best ones from there, and write them down.
Industry skills are important to include as proof that you are studying relevant topics that will benefit an employer. But since everyone in your class is studying those same things, you need something more. You need to include your transferable skills.
Transferable Skills
If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you can probably guess what our next step is going to be: to read our guide on identifying your transferable skills.
Knowing your transferable skills means knowing what sets you apart: what is it that makes you stand out from all the other applicants in your field? These factors set the foundation for your personal brand, the reputation that you project in your professional field.
Your LinkedIn summary is where you want to make those factors crystal clear to employers. Why are you different from the rest? Why should they remember you? A well-written summary will answer those questions for them.
Take some time to read our guide and identify your transferable skills. Write them down.
You now have a list of industry-specific skills that show you are technically capable of working in your field, and transferable skills that differentiate you from the competition. Now you’re ready to start building your summary.
Step Two: What’s Your Story?
It’s no secret that people love stories—that’s why storytelling is a key part of marketing. So, in the art of marketing yourself to employers, it’s powerful to build a story.
Think: how did you get into this industry? How did you realize you were passionate about this? When you started studying, what made you sure you were on the right track? Did your transferable skills from before your education come into play during your education to make you successful?
Think about this and jot down some notes.
Step Three: Putting It Together
Now you have two things: a basic narrative of your professional development, and a list of skills (both industry and transferable). Now you’re ready to stitch the two together.
Because you have the information already laid out, writing your summary is like filling out a formula. You want to answer the following questions:
- What are your skills? What experience do these skills come from?
- What are your interests?
- How do your skills and interests apply to your industry?
Each answer should be one to two sentences. You can play around with the order and the information you include, but starting here will give you a framework to build your summary.
Step Four: Make It Yours
There is no magic formula for writing your LinkedIn summary, and that’s a good thing. Your summary should be yours—in your voice, about you, with your personality. You want to walk the line between professional and personal, because that’s the kind of thing that will make you memorable to employers.
Write a few drafts following the framework above, and have a trusted editor read them. Like any job-related materials, typos and grammatical mistakes are a huge no-no, so proofreading is key.
Once you settle on a summary that fits your brand, add it to your page and admire how professional you look. This is the hardest part of getting your LinkedIn profile ready, and you’ve done great.
Are you an Algonquin College co-op student? We host workshops on building and utilizing your LinkedIn profile. Keep an eye on upcoming events on HireAC under Coop/Events and Workshops.
If you would like to learn more about the Algonquin College co-op program, please visit our website at https://www.algonquincollege.com/coop/, connect with us at coop@algonquincollege.com or call us at 613-727-4723 Ext.7623. You can also follow us on Twitter @AlgonquinCoop.