Use Your Career Break to Your Benefit on LinkedIn. Here's how
LinkedIn now lets you explain any gaps on your resume.
- 2022 Eddie award for consumer analysis
LinkedIn has 810 million members in more than 200 countries and territories.
Life can be challenging, especially as people continue to grapple with burnout, parenting and other hardships amid the coronavirus pandemic. Taking a career break, though, can feel risky. Business-oriented social network LinkedIn aims to normalize career breaks by encouraging users to highlight what they learned from these experiences.
The Microsoft-owned company released a feature on March 1 that allows people to add a career break to their LinkedIn profiles through the desktop site or mobile app, giving them a way to explain the gaps in their resume. Career break types include parenting, layoffs, bereavement, career transition and travel.
"The goal here is to be able to provide space for people to share more context and color about how these experiences have helped them grow and develop skills that are valuable in life and at work," said Camilla Han-He, a senior product manager at LinkedIn.
Han-He said LinkedIn started hearing more from its users about wanting a way to highlight their career breaks on the social network. Career breaks are more common among women. About 67% of career break-related posts on LinkedIn in January came from female members, the company said. LinkedIn, citing a January survey, said 64% of women worldwide have taken a career break with the percentage being higher in the US. About 70% of women say taking a career break helped them gain perspective and figure out what they really want from life, LinkedIn said a January survey showed.
We'll walk you through how you can add a career break to your own LinkedIn profile.
How to add a career break to your LinkedIn profile
Career breaks will appear under the experience section in your LinkedIn profile.
Putting a career break on your LinkedIn resume is fairly simple to do. It takes just a couple steps.
- Click on add section located under your profile picture
- Then, select add career break
From there, you can pick a career break type and fill out information about the length of your career break, a description and attach any relevant media. When you're finished adding the relevant information, click save.
LinkedIn is also offering free online courses through March that aims to help people transition back to work after taking a career break. Some of the courses include returning to work with a resume gap, negotiating work flexibility and inclusive female leadership.
For more career and productivity-oriented tips, check out 6 Google features that will help you work more efficiently, the best apps to keep you organized and these Windows 11 productivity tricks.