LinkedIn About Section Examples and What to Actually Write

The two lines that decide everything

LinkedIn collapses the About section after a short preview, and the reader has to tap to see the rest. Whatever you think of that design, it has one clear consequence: the first sentence and a half carries almost the entire weight of the section, and anything you put in front of it is a cost.

The commonest mistake is spending that preview on a warm-up. "I am a passionate professional with a demonstrated history of working in the industry" uses the whole visible portion to say nothing, and the reader never taps. The fix is not cleverness. It is putting the most specific true sentence you have in the first position.

A four-part structure

Not the only workable shape, but the one that survives most careers and most reading orders, because it puts the parts in descending order of usefulness to a stranger.

1. The hook (2 lines)

What you do, for whom, and your strongest single piece of evidence. This is what shows before the fold, and it should stand alone if nobody reads further.

2. How you work (1-2 paragraphs)

The kinds of problems you take on, the approach you bring, the environments you are effective in. This is where a hiring manager judges fit, which is a different question from whether you are qualified.

3. What you know (short list or paragraph)

Tools, domains, systems, methodologies, languages, regulatory frameworks — in the market's vocabulary. This is also the part the platform's search reads.

4. What is next, and how to reach you

The roles or work you are open to, and an email address if you want to be contacted. One or two sentences. A lot of otherwise good About sections simply stop before this, leaving the reader nowhere to go.

Between 200 and 350 words is the usual sweet spot. You are given 2,600 characters and you are under no obligation to spend them; a tight 250 words beats a rambling 400 every time. Break it into short paragraphs with blank lines between them, because an unbroken block of text on a phone is functionally unreadable and gets skipped whatever it says.

Voice: what actually separates it from your resume

A resume is a formal document with conventions that flatten personality on purpose — no pronouns, no digression, evidence stacked in reverse chronological order. The About section is the opposite, and it is worth writing carefully because it does a job your resume structurally cannot.

Concretely, that means several permissions your resume does not grant. You can use "I". You can say why you moved from one field to another in a sentence, rather than leaving a reader to infer a story from two dates. You can name the kind of work you like and the kind you turn down. You can be direct about what you want next. And you can write sentences of varying length that sound like speech, which is the most reliable way to sound like a person rather than a template.

What you should not do is mistake voice for vagueness. Personality without specifics reads as evasion, and the most engaging About sections are usually the most concrete ones — they simply deliver their specifics in a conversational register instead of a bureaucratic one.

Four worked openings

Illustrations, with invented details. The pattern to copy is that each commits to a specific claim in the first sentence rather than warming up to one.

Each of those is one paragraph. Each names a field, a level and a concrete artefact. None uses the word "passionate", and none opens by defining what the job title means.

Keywords, without wrecking the prose

The About section is indexed by the platform's search, so the terms in it contribute to whether you are retrieved. That is true, it is worth acting on, and it is also the most abused fact in LinkedIn advice — it is the excuse behind every profile with a paragraph of comma-separated skills bolted onto the end.

The reasonable version: write the section for a human, then check that the eight or ten terms a recruiter would search for appear in it naturally. Usually they already do, because those terms are simply the words for the work you do. Where one is genuinely missing, it can almost always be worked into a real sentence — "most of my reporting runs through Power BI" rather than a bare "Power BI" in a trailing list.

Where terms genuinely belong in a list, LinkedIn already provides one. The Skills section is structured, filterable and considerably better at retrieval than prose ever is; use it for that job and let the About section be prose. Our guide to the skills to put on LinkedIn covers how that field is actually used.

On numbers and claims

Anything you assert here should be something you can talk about for five minutes. That sounds obvious and it is broken constantly, usually by someone rounding a real achievement upward until it stops being defensible. The About section is read before an interview and quoted during one, and a number you cannot explain is worse than no number at all.

A checklist before you save

• The first two lines contain a specific claim, not an adjective.
• It is written in the first person throughout.
• There are blank lines between paragraphs, and no paragraph runs longer than four lines.
• At least one concrete result, number or named piece of work appears in the first half.
• The terms someone would search for you with appear somewhere, inside real sentences.
• The last paragraph says what you are open to and how to contact you.
• Nothing in it contradicts your resume or your Experience section.
• Nothing in it is a claim you could not defend in an interview.

If you want a starting draft rather than a blank box, the LinkedIn optimiser generates About wording from facts you give it, which you then edit into your own voice — it produces copy, not a connection to your account. To check a version you have written, the profile audit scores pasted text against the 2,600-character limit and the structural points above. Because this section and your resume summary should say compatible things, it is worth reading the summary versus objective guide alongside it, or building the resume first in the free builder and working backwards from it. For a neutral outside view on tone in professional writing, Purdue OWL and the National Careers Service are both non-commercial and usefully unexcited.