LinkedIn Career Breaks

Did you know that LinkedIn has recently launched a brand new feature called the career break feature. And it’s amazing. If you have taken a career break, I think this is something that you definitely want to explore. Hi, I’m Danielle Bradley of coach with Danielle and I help mid career professionals get hired for their most amazing job yet. So I’m excited about this new LinkedIn feature, because I think it can really help people be very proactive in how they explain if they have taken, whether it was a career break that you took proactively, or whether it was a career break due to a layoff, or some other situation that had to be addressed.

The reality is that career breaks are very common nowadays. And we have in part, the pandemic, to thank for that a lot of people had to go through some form of a break from their regular career in the pandemic, and of course, for many other reasons. And LinkedIn now makes it very easy for us to explain what that career break was for. And the truth is that a lot of hiring managers and recruiters while they would rather know what the break was for, and this is now an amazing opportunity to explain things in a proactive way that is going to serve you. Hiring managers are now realizing that not considering potential candidates because they appear to have had a gap in their career is not only something that is a discriminatory practice, but it also leaves them with an untapped talent pool of people that can make amazing employees for the roles that they’re looking to fill. So let me show you right behind my screen on LinkedIn, how you can address a career break proactively.

Okay, so here we are on LinkedIn. And I’m going to show you where you can add this information. So you go scroll down to your experience, and you click on the plus sign. And there you see you have a choice of adding a position or adding a career break. So let’s click on adding a career break. Now, one thing I want to mention is that this feature is not necessarily available to everyone, you can see here that LinkedIn is saying important to know that this is being gradually rolled out. And so you may not yet see this feature. However, I think a lot of people are seeing this. And it is the only way to find out is to go into your LinkedIn profile and and check here you see all the different types of breaks, there are 13 that go in range from bereavement career transition to caregiving, parenting, a gap year, retirement, maybe you’ve retired and you’ve decided to go back to work. The travel one, I love that I wish that existed when I was younger, and I traveled Europe for several months, that would have been a great thing to be able to put on my profile. And so here’s an example. Let’s plug that in. And then you can actually talk about where you traveled. And you can actually say whether or not you’re on this career break right now, you can put in exactly when that was. And you can put in a headline, obviously, it picked up the headline here of the current position, but you would remove that and put in your own headline and description. So in terms of the reasons for the break, I would say if possible and applicable, try to make it relevant to your career. So let’s say you took a break in order to go back to school, well, you want to make sure that what you put in here are skills that you learned and experiences that you had that would benefit your career and potential employers. If you were laid off during the pandemic, talk about how you use that time, the courses that you maybe took the skills that you developed the contract work that you had, you want to be specific there and always put yourself in the mind of a prospective employer for your target role.

When you’re putting this together. It’s so important. It shouldn’t just be all about you. For the most part, especially if it was something of a layoff or going back to school or something like that. You want to make sure that it ends up being of benefit to a potential employer. Of course if it was something like caregiving or taking care of children, there could still be some things that you were able to learn some skills that you were able to add to your list of skills and experiences that would benefit a prospective employer.

That’s it for today’s video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you like this video, click the like button, subscribe to my channel to be notified when I publish new videos. And also, I wanted to tell you that I have an amazing LinkedIn profile makeover program where I walk you through every aspect of how to create a LinkedIn profile that helps you get interviews and job offers and you can find out more about that program at coachwithdanielle.com/linkedin-toolkit.

Bye for now