How To Reorder The Jobs Within Your LinkedIn Profile

Steve Tylock

Ever since LinkedIn started adding attributes and customizing the way profiles look, people have been asking how to reorder their jobs.

The answer is relatively simple – you can’t.

But within that constraint, I can tell you how LinkedIn orders jobs, and what you can do if you really must.

Chronological, Current First

There – that’s the order it chooses; oldest at the bottom, open at the top.

So within that constraint, you can see that if you have 3 open positions, the most recently begun will be listed at the top of the experience section, and the oldest will be at the bottom.

Playing with fire

Until LinkedIn rolls out some “reorder your jobs” feature, there isn’t much to do about the situation.

But if you must – change the start date(s).

Make the one you want at the bottom start earlier than the others, or make the one you want to start at the top start after the others.

And I’m not saying this is a “really good thing to do” either – you take on a significant potential risks: will the misrepresentation come back to bite you.

You could also include the same position with a couple different dates to get it to appear in multiple places, but that’s usually more confusing to the reader. (“Hey – doesn’t Fred realize that he’s got the same position listed twice?”)

Leaving out details

You could remove information from your profile if it really gets in the way.

My hope is that you’d be able to describe all of your positions in a way that supports your personal brand. And that you establish that overall brand with the text in your Summary – that appears above all of the positions.

Unique issues

I expect that those in non-traditional roles will encounter this more often than those in traditional positions.

How have you dealt with it?

To your continued success,

steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock

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8 Comments

  2. Kevin is correct, four years later LinkedIn has added the option to alter the order of your jobs within your profile;-)

    You can now drag and drop them to change the order.

    Best,
    steve

  3. I Can’t drag and drop the positions.
    When I clic the positions, everything go blue ande open the editor for this position…

    I wanto the start date order, because I have several position in present time…

    best
    OP

  4. Osvaldo,

    It appears that LinkedIn givith, and LinkedIn taketh away… The edit profile screen appears completely different to me now, and I don’t seem to have the ability to reorder as I did just two weeks ago.

    Alas, nothing we can do to affect it…

    steve

  5. Well thank you LinkedIn, so very little.

    Let me assure you that there is most assuredly a need for many of your users/customers (as evidenced in the above comments and on other sites and blogs around the Web) to have the ability/option to reorder our positions. Please restore this functionality. If necessary, add an alert when a user starts the process, in order to avoid unintentional rearrangement of items.

  6. Robert,

    Thanks for the comment.

    I’m not sure who you’re talking to with your request though – I doubt LinkedIn reads my blog…

    steve

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