Hidden among the other LinkedIn elements, the Experience section provides the rest of the personal story that helps its profile holder’s profile resonate with one’s talents and background.

Sadly, many users think they can find an updated resume and transfer it here.

My work as a LinkedIn coach focuses on telling these sagas behind these bullets of information.

The first thing I do as your Experience section’s reconstruction advisor is to add a noun to every sentence. Resume coaches tell their students a noun is unneeded. LinkedIn uses a different writing format when you want to use a story-telling format.

Let me share this LinkedIn snippet of what I would term “resumespeak” copy from Keith Cassant.

“Scheduled and issued C-School training orders for Coast Guard Active Duty, Reserve, Civilian, and Auxiliary members to attend Coast Guard hosted, commercial, Army, Navy, Air Force, and other agency training, to include but not limited to leveraging Direct Access systems, including Training Administrative System (TAS) or respective systems.”

Here s how I would tell Keith to add the missing noun to this sentence along with some other simple changes.

I issued training orders for the Coast Guard team members including its active duty, reserve, civilian and auxiliary members.

The next part of rewriting this for the experience section?

It’s attribution.

Journalists like me know that when attribution is included, it gives clarity and leaves no doubt about Keith’s contribution to that Coast Guard mission.

Consider this…..

According to my boss, Lieutenant Commander Davy Jones, my team increased direct access to those eligible for training. In my performance report, he noted that I “was responsible for helping to maximize our training effectiveness through Coast Guard training systems.”

In this suggested change, attribution is the additional feature of Keith’s experience section. It showed the clarity of his previous role.

If coaching Keith, I would ask him for more information. I’d ask things such as how many people did he provide training support to enhance their careers? Were there other aspects of this job that stood out?

Again, this is hypothetical thinking on my part. Were there specific numbers, I would ask Keith: “And, what was the impact of your work?” Given this information, I would suggest rewriting this experience section this way.

Commander Jones added that I served more than 9,500 Coast Guard professionals. When commanders and supervisors commented on the need for more water safety courses after the previous year’s hurricane season’s impact, I found and then added two new courses.

Besides the data info, I am often asked by students about where they can find attribution from supervisors and other colleagues.

First, performance reports provide attribution sources. Next, organizational awards can also provide a source for one’s Experience Section.

One student, retired Army First Sergeant Michael Brownfiel asked his former supervisor a couple of questions about his role in a significant project. These were included in his experience section update.

The last thing that I would tell LinkedIn users allow their profile holders to enhance their experience profile. It’s visuals.

The military provides a vast resource of visuals through its www.dvidshub.net website. Michael found an assortment of photos that showed his team’s work in deploying more than 4400 people from the 25th Infantry Division from Hawaii to Louisiana.

For those with non-military roles, I suggest photos from their company’s website or ask their marketing department for images.

Whatever your visual resource, I would ask this question before posting it to support your LinkedIn experience section.

Attribution and visuals placed within a LinkedIn experience section can play an important role to tell anyone’s story to content visitors.