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Using LinkedIn to help accelerate your career growth and opportunities
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When most professionals think about improving their LinkedIn presence, they tend to focus first on the obvious areas: their headline, profile photo, About section, latest job title, and responsibilities.
Those elements certainly matter, but after years of coaching professionals and leaders on how to strengthen their LinkedIn presence and share their thought leadership, I’ve found that some of the most overlooked sections on LinkedIn are often the very places that reveal whether an individual is ready for their next opportunity and chapter.
Today, LinkedIn is not simply an online resume. It’s a living reflection of your personal brand and your professional identity – including your credibility, impact, voice, collaboration, direction, and visibility.
And increasingly, recruiters, collaborators, clients, media contacts, and hiring managers are paying attention not only to where you’ve worked, but also to how clearly and compellingly you communicate your value, along with what conversations you engage in, the topics you amplify, and what your profile reflects about where you’re headed next.
Here are five often-neglected LinkedIn sections that will support your desired growth and deserve more attention.
1. The Featured Section: What Do You Want To Be Known For?
Many professionals either ignore LinkedIn’s Featured section entirely or treat it as a random collection of links. That’s a missed opportunity.
The Featured section is one of the clearest places to shape what visitors immediately associate with your expertise and professional identity. LinkedIn notes that the section can be used to showcase articles, posts, media, links, and professional work examples directly on your profile.
When someone lands on your profile, what do you most want them to remember? Your Featured section can help answer that quickly. (Here are some key tips and FAQs from LinkedIn about how to best approach this section.)
Instead of filling it with unrelated links, use it strategically to reinforce your core strengths, interests, thought leadership, or body of work.
This may include:
- Articles
- Interviews
- Podcasts
- Presentations
- Media appearances
- Key projects
- Portfolio samples
- Newsletters
- Assessments or resources
For professionals seeking career growth, consulting work, speaking opportunities, or leadership visibility, this section can communicate far more than a traditional resume ever could.
It helps others see not simply what you’ve done, but how you think, contribute, and communicate.
2. Recommendations: How Do Other People Experience You?
In conversations with professionals about how to boost their LinkedIn presence, we always come around to discussing obtaining recommendations, and almost universally, people resist reaching out to colleagues, supporters, mentors and sponsors because they find it awkward and uncomfortable to make that ask (which makes it easy to postpone or push off).
But in today’s AI-heavy environment, authentic recommendations carry even greater weight precisely because they feel human and reflect personal impressions of your work that you didn’t generate yourself.
Strong recommendations offer important social proof about qualities that are often difficult to communicate effectively on your own, such as:
- Leadership presence
- Collaboration impact
- Strategic thinking
- Communication style
- Integrity and trustworthiness
- Emotional intelligence
- Reliability
- Impact
And importantly, they reveal how others experience working with you and what they remember most about collaborating with you. These recommendations can be truly transformative for you, because they often share specific language and descriptors of your most impactful work that you never knew people felt about you.
It’s important to keep your recommendations updated, however, to add meaningful value. A handful of thoughtful, current recommendations from respected colleagues, clients, managers, or peers can significantly strengthen credibility and your own confidence in your contributions.
Don’t wait until you urgently need a new role to begin gathering them. Start today. And be generous to others – share glowing recommendations of people who’ve made a positive difference in your life and career.
3. Your Activity Section: Is Your Professional Voice Visible?
One of the biggest misconceptions about LinkedIn is that people only look at profiles.
In reality, many people quickly scroll down to examine your activity.
They want to see:
- What topics you engage with
- Whether your thinking feels current
- How you communicate, collaborate and comment publicly
- What issues matter most to you
- Whether you’re contributing fresh ideas and perspectives that move conversations forward
You don’t need to post every day to build visibility and credibility on LinkedIn, but consistency matters. Several social media and career experts recommend posting two to five times per week to help maintain engagement and visibility with professional audiences.
The key is to regularly share insights, comment meaningfully, support others, and contribute informed viewpoints to showcase your unique lens and experience, and areas of deep interest.
Your activity section quietly communicates whether your professional voice is active or absent.
4. Skills: What Do You Want To Be Leveraging Next?
Many people treat LinkedIn skills as an afterthought. But your Skills section should not simply reflect your past. It should also support your future direction.
This matters because recruiters increasingly use skills-based searches to identify candidates, and the workplace itself continues to evolve rapidly.
LinkedIn’s recruiting research has highlighted the growing importance of skills-based hiring, and LinkedIn currently allows users to include up to 100 skills on their profiles.
Too often, professionals leave outdated skills in place or fail to prioritize the capabilities most aligned with the work they want to pursue next.
If you are moving toward leadership, consulting, coaching, AI-related work, speaking, strategy, or a career pivot, your skills should help reinforce that transition.
Your LinkedIn profile should not trap you inside an older professional identity but support the one you are building now.
5. The Services and “Open To” Sections: Are You Clear About How People Can Engage With You?
Many professionals hesitate to complete these sections because they worry about appearing overly available or promotional. But ambiguity often costs opportunities.
One of the biggest reasons talented professionals are overlooked is not a lack of capability, but a lack of clarity. If someone visits your profile after hearing you speak, reading your article, or receiving your name through a referral, can they quickly understand:
- What you do specifically
- Who you help and why
- What type of opportunities interest you
- How to contact or work with you
The easier you make engagement, the more likely opportunities can emerge. Clarity creates momentum. For more on how to set up your Services section, start here.
LinkedIn Is Not a Static Career Archive
Perhaps the biggest shift professionals need to make is recognizing that LinkedIn is no longer a static career archive.
It’s an evolving professional ecosystem that reflects not only your experience, but also your visibility, direction, credibility, and readiness for what comes next. And it’s a unique space where you can engage with some of the most inspiring creators, contributors, and changemakers who are shaping the directions you care about most.
The strongest profiles are not necessarily the most polished or keyword-optimized. They are the profiles that feel intentional, current, human, and aligned with where you’re genuinely ready to grow next.