The way your career is interpreted online is changing. LinkedIn is using AI to understand the connections across your experience, looking beyond keywords to identify patterns in your skills, capabilities, and career trajectory. Your visibility is no longer determined by what appears on your profile, but by the story your profile communicates, which influences who finds you, the expertise you’re associated with, and what professional opportunities get recommended.
Does your career story make sense?
If you present your profile as a collection of job titles, company names, and dates of employment with little narrative context, it becomes harder to understand and appreciate your value. Both AI and the people reviewing your profile are looking for the same thing: the thread that ties your career together. In other words, does your career trajectory make sense to someone who does not already know your background? We’ll follow the progression of someone who started in process engineering, moved into project engineering, and now works in operations leadership, and explore how their Headline, About, Experience, and Skills sections work together to tell a clearer story.
Your Headline sets the direction
It starts with your Headline, one of the first things that helps both search algorithms and human readers quickly understand who you are professionally. Use this space to establish your broader professional identity and signal where you want your career to go.
A helpful formula: [Target Role] | [Areas of Expertise] | [Problems You Solve / Outcomes You Drive] | [Unique Differentiator].
If you don’t customize your Headline, LinkedIn defaults to your current, or most recent, job title — in this case, Operations Manager. While accurate, that title alone doesn’t tell the full story.
A stronger Headline might be: Manufacturing Operations Manager | Process Optimization | Continuous Improvement | Engineering Leadership | Improving Reliability, Efficiency & Production Performance.
This Headline provides a clearer understanding of this person’s expertise and career direction.
Use your About section to connect the dots
While your Headline establishes your broader professional identity, your About section tells the story behind it. Use this space to explain who you are professionally, the types of problems you solve, how your expertise has evolved, and where you want to go next. For our Operations Manager example, this is where they might explain how their technical foundation in process engineering led to project engineering, and ultimately broader operational leadership. They can also highlight themes that have remained consistent throughout their career, such as process improvement, complex problem-solving, or cross-functional leadership.
Turn your experience into evidence
Your Experience section provides the evidence behind your career story. While each role stands on its own, the goal is not to treat positions in isolation. Instead, show how each experience contributes to the professional identity you’re building. For our Operations Manager example, each role highlights a different capability that contributed to that progression: technical problem-solving as a Process Engineer, project execution as a Project Engineer, and leadership and business impact as an Operations Manager.
Instead of listing responsibilities, use each role to explain why you were hired, the challenges you faced, and the capabilities you developed. For example: “managed process improvement projects” tells us what happened, but it doesn’t tell us much about the complexity behind the work. Now, compare that with: “I led process improvement initiatives in a high-volume specialty chemicals manufacturing plant, where I worked with production teams to analyze bottlenecks, investigate root causes, and implement changes that improved throughput and reliability.” By contextualizing the environment, the problems you solved, and how you applied your expertise, your experience is more easily understood.
Make your skills mean something
Your Skills section reinforces your professional identity. Use it to highlight the technical and job-specific skills you want associated with your profile, while using your About and Experience sections to show how you applied them, solved problems, and delivered. Listing MATLAB, Python, and Process Modeling shows your familiarity with those skills. However, an Experience entry explaining how you used MATLAB to model process behavior, evaluate design alternatives, or support engineering decisions shows what those skills enabled you to accomplish. If you’re not sure what to include, ask yourself: What skills show up repeatedly? What capabilities have helped me solve problems? What do I want to be known for in my next role?
See your profile through someone else’s eye’s
What professional identity does your profile communicate? If someone looked only at your most recent roles, what would they assume you’re known for? Read through your most recent experience entries and ask yourself: What does it look like I do, and what would someone hire me to do next? For a more objective perspective, ask a colleague outside your immediate field the same questions and compare their answers to your intended direction.
You can no longer treat LinkedIn as a record of where you’ve worked. It needs to represent your career story: the skills you’ve developed, the problems you solve, and the value you deliver. Engineers who can clearly communicate that across their careers will be better positioned than those who assume their experience speaks for itself.
This article originally appeared in the Career Connection column in the August 2026 issue of CEP. Members have access online to complete issues, including a vast, searchable archive of back issues found at www.aiche.org/cep. Learn more about AIChE membership.
