LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking platform with over 740 million members worldwide. As a professional social media site, LinkedIn allows its members to create profiles that highlight their work experiences, skills, education, and accomplishments. One of the key features of LinkedIn is the ability for members to create a showcase page to display their portfolio, projects, publications, patents, courses, certifications, test scores, honors and awards, volunteer work, languages, and more. But what exactly is the purpose of creating a showcase page on LinkedIn?
Highlighting Your Best Work and Skills
The main purpose of a LinkedIn showcase page is to highlight your best work, skills, and achievements in one dedicated section of your profile. It allows you to go beyond just listing your work history and details and actually display and demonstrate the projects and accomplishments you are most proud of. This provides a way for you to showcase your skills and expertise through concrete examples. Rather than just saying you have great design skills, you can display your best design work. Rather than just listing that you know web development, you can show off the websites you’ve built. It brings your abilities to life.
Increasing Discoverability
Having a showcase page helps increase your discoverability as a professional, making it easier for others to find you based on your skills, experience, and interests. When people search LinkedIn for professionals with expertise in certain areas, those who have robust, detailed showcase pages tend to rank higher in results. Your projects, publications, certifications, awards, and other items on your showcase page also have their own dedicated URLs on LinkedIn that can come up in searches. So creating a vibrant, comprehensive showcase provides more opportunities for networking contacts, recruiters, clients, and others to find you.
Validating Your Expertise
The showcase page serves as a way to validate the expertise you outline in your profile summary, work history, skills section, and endorsements. Anyone can claim to have great skills or achievements. But your showcase page proves it by providing the concrete evidence and demonstration of those abilities. Displays of your actual work carry more weight and legitimacy than just descriptions. Seeing your programming code, design portfolio, writing samples, completed projects, data visualizations, and other work you highlight on your showcase page helps convince visitors that you truly have the skills and experience you claim.
Differentiating Yourself
Given how many profiles are on LinkedIn, it can be challenging to stand out from the crowd. An eye-catching, comprehensive showcase page that displays your best work and skills is one of the most effective ways to differentiate yourself from other professionals with similar backgrounds. It provides a level of demonstration and personalization that a standard profile lacks. Someone can quickly get a sense of who you are as a professional by viewing the projects, publications, and achievements you chose to highlight on your showcase page.
Establishing Your Professional Brand
Your LinkedIn profile, especially the showcase page, represents your professional brand. It’s a snapshot of your professional identity and how you want to be perceived by others in your industry. An impactful showcase page allows you to craft your image as an expert in your field by exhibiting your most impressive and relevant work in one place. It’s an opportunity to put your best foot forward and control how your capabilities and accomplishments are presented to the professional world. Your showcase helps tell your unique story as a professional.
Attracting New Opportunities
A compelling, comprehensive showcase page can help attract exciting new professional opportunities by making you more findable and memorable to those that matter in your industry. Displaying your best projects, publications, certifications and skills shows others the value you can bring to their organization. Your showcase provides concrete proof of your capabilities that can catch the eye of potential employers, clients, partners, and other networking contacts who could expand your professional horizons. So beyond summarizing your background, your showcase page can directly help you advance your career.
Telling Your Professional Story
Your showcase page allows you to tell your professional story beyond the confines of standard profile sections like experience, education, and skills. You can provide important context that brings your background to life. For example, you can explain why certain projects or publications meant a lot to you, what you learned from key experiences, how your skills have evolved over the years, and your future ambitions. Your showcase can reveal parts of your professional journey and personality that a traditional profile can’t convey. It adds unique depth and humanity.
Showcasing Achievements
For many professionals, particularly those in highly specialized or technical fields, their published papers, patents, certifications, test scores, and other important achievements may not always fit neatly into the default sections of their profile. That’s where the showcase page comes in handy. It gives you a place to proudly display key credentials, accolades, and achievements that deserve to be highlighted but don’t have another obvious home in your profile. This provides well-earned bragging rights and demonstrates your commitment to pursuing excellence in your field.
Tailoring Content to Different Audiences
One benefit of the showcase page is the ability to tailor content to specific audiences you want to reach, such as potential employers, clients, business partners, or investors. For example, if you’re looking to land a new job, you can spotlight projects and skills that are most relevant to recruiters. If you’re seeking new consulting gigs, you can emphasize client case studies. You can create different sections of your showcase page to appeal to different stakeholders. This level of customization and targeting is difficult in traditional profile formats.
Adding Visual Interest
The multimedia capabilities of the showcase page allow you to incorporate visual elements that liven up your profile. You can include videos, graphics, presentations, photos, infographics, illustrations, portfolios pieces and more. This adds visual interest to help your showcase page stand out compared to text-heavy profiles. Interactive elements can also enhance viewer engagement. Visually captivating showcases make your abilities and accomplishments more memorable.
Communicating Your Passions
Your showcase page provides space to highlight personal or professional passions beyond the constraints of your current job title or duties. For example, you could showcase nonprofit volunteering experiences, artistic talents, conference presentations, teaching certifications, award-winning gardening expertise, or any other topics important to you. This conveys a more well-rounded image of who you are and gives opportunities to connect over shared interests.
Demonstrating Your Leadership
For managers, executives, team leaders, and other business leaders, a showcase page delivers an outlet to highlight your leadership skills by displaying successful projects, events, initiatives and campaigns you have led or created. Being able to provide concrete evidence of your leadership capabilities, instead of just listing general leadership experience on your profile, can be invaluable for reinforcing your credentials.
Promoting Your Business or Brand
Entrepreneurs, freelancers, consultants, authors, influencers, and other professionals focused on self-promotion can leverage their showcase page as a marketing asset. You can provide links, previews, and samples of your products, services, creative work, thought leadership content, and brand initiatives. Your showcase becomes aConvert visitors into customers or clients shop window.
This allows you to attract and engage your target audience and convert visitors into customers or clients.
Demonstrating Academic and Research Achievements
For students, academics, scientists and researchers, the showcase page gives you a platform to demonstrate your academic and intellectual achievements through published papers, presentations, patents, projects, theses, dissertations, experiments, conferences, grants and more. This can help elevate your scholarly profile and establish your reputation in your field.
Showcasing Event Highlights
If you organize events like conferences, seminars, workshops, or trade shows, your showcase page provides a place to display highlights, photos, videos, presentations, and key details from current and past events. This serves as social proof that can help promote and build excitement for your future events.
Complementing Your Portfolio Website
For creative professionals like designers, artists, photographers etc., your LinkedIn showcase page can provide a nice complement to your professional portfolio website by featuring select highlights of your best work. However, your full portfolio site should still serve as your primary destination to display the full breadth of your creative work and capabilities in richer detail.
Tracking Your Progress Over Time
As you continue add new projects, achievements, publications, certifications and other items to your showcase page over months and years, it begins to document your professional journey and progress within your industry. This becomes a track record you can look back on and demonstrate how you have expanded your skills and accomplishments.
Inspiring Your Connections
A well-executed showcase page doesn’t just benefit you. It can also inspire your LinkedIn connections by revealing the stories behind your biggest accomplishments and demonstrating how passion and hard work pay off. This can motivate others in your network to pursue their own goals and projects.
Conclusion
In summary, the primary purpose of the LinkedIn showcase page is to highlight your best work, skills, and achievements in an engaging, visually compelling way that tells your unique professional story. It serves as a portfolio and platform for demonstrating the value you can bring to potential employers, clients, partners, and others in your industry. A strong showcase page helps you stand out, validate your expertise, attract opportunities, and build your professional brand on LinkedIn.