You will be able to fill your profile with evidence a recruiter can scan.
A recruiter clicks on your profile from a search. They have read your headline and your About section, and they are curious. Then they scroll down and find your current job listed with a title and nothing else, a role from four years ago with a one-line description, a skills list that includes "Microsoft Word" and "teamwork", and no recommendations. Most of them leave at that point.
The headline and About section from lesson 4.1, Headline and About: say who you help and how, get people to your profile. The sections below them decide whether they stay and get in touch. This lesson covers the experience entries, skills, recommendations and photo.
You already did the hard work in module 3. Your master CV from lesson 3.5, Rebuild your CV, has result bullets for every role. For each role on LinkedIn, copy in your strongest two or three, picking the ones most relevant to your target direction.
Two or three is enough. A recruiter scanning your profile reads the first few lines of each role, and a long list buries your best result. LinkedIn also shows only the first part of each description before a reader clicks to see more, so put the strongest bullet first.
You can warm the language slightly, as lesson 4.4 will cover, but keep the facts identical to your CV. Arjun's entry for his teaching role leads with "Designed a six-week revision programme for 35 lower-secondary students, later adopted by two other teachers in the department", the same bullet as on his CV.
Fill in the older roles too, even briefly. A role with only a title looks unfinished, and a gap in your history raises questions. One result line each is fine for roles that are less relevant now.
LinkedIn lets you list skills on your profile, and recruiters can search by them. Add the skills from your market sheet that you can honestly claim, using the same words the job ads use. If your market sheet shows "data visualisation" in fourteen of twenty ads and you build dashboards, add it.
Remove skills that every candidate has or that say nothing about your target role. "Microsoft Word" and "teamwork" take space a more useful skill could use. Arjun replaced "classroom management" with "instructional design", "facilitation" and "training needs analysis", all skills he uses and all words that appear in learning and development ads.
The same rule from module 3 applies. Do not add a skill you cannot talk about in an interview. A recruiter who finds you through a skill will ask about it.
A recommendation is a short note from someone who worked with you, shown on your profile. It is the closest LinkedIn gets to a reference, and readers trust it more than anything you write about yourself, because someone else said it.
Ask people who saw your work directly: a former manager, a colleague on a project, a client. Ask fewer people and choose them well. Two specific recommendations from people who know your work are worth more than ten vague ones.
The best way to get a useful recommendation is to suggest what the person could mention. Most people are happy to help but freeze in front of a blank box. Arjun's message to his former head of department read: "Would you be willing to write a short LinkedIn recommendation? I'm moving into corporate training, so it would help most if you could mention the revision programme and the new-teacher workshops. No worries if you're too busy." The suggestion makes it easy, and the last line makes it easy to say no.
A profile photo helps people recognise you. After you meet someone at an event or on a call, they may look you up, and a photo confirms they have found the right person. It also makes your profile feel like a person rather than a placeholder.
Use a clear, recent photo of you alone, with your face easy to see. It does not need to be a studio portrait. A photo taken by a friend against a plain wall in good daylight works. Avoid group shots, cropped wedding photos and pictures where you are hard to make out.
This is a different question from the photo on your CV. Lesson 3.3, What to leave off a Singapore CV, recommended leaving the photo off your CV, because a CV is a screening document where a photo adds nothing. LinkedIn is a networking site where people need to recognise each other, and there a photo is expected.
With these sections filled in, your profile tells the same story from top to bottom: the headline says what you want, the About section explains why you fit, the experience gives evidence, the skills make you searchable and the recommendations let someone else vouch for you.
The activity focuses on your last two roles and two recommendation requests, because those give the biggest improvement for the least effort.
Update your last two roles with result bullets and send two recommendation requests with suggested points.
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