How to Create a LinkedIn Profile: a Trainer's Checklist, Element by Element

This article answers the question of how to create a professional LinkedIn profile. It’s the checklist my training participants use to review and improve their own profiles. I go element by element: visibility and profile URL, keywords, photo and banner, headline, contact info, the Featured section, About, experience, education, skills, recommendations, certifications and extra sections. For each one I describe how AI can help, and at the end I show how to check whether your profile is ready.

I opened my LinkedIn account in 2006, and since 2016 I have been training companies on it, over 3,700 people in total. This checklist was created for participants of my “LinkedIn from A to Z” training.

How to open a LinkedIn account

If you don’t have an account yet, you open one on LinkedIn’s sign-up page. According to LinkedIn’s help, it goes like this:

1. Enter your first and last name and your email address, and a password only if LinkedIn asks for one.
2. Click “Join now” and go through the steps the screen shows you.
3. Instead of an email you can join with a Google or Apple account, and then you don’t enter a password.

Three rules from the terms of service are worth remembering from the start: you open the profile under your real first and last name (not a company name or a nickname), you don’t use a team address like marketing@ or sales@, and you have one profile per person. Once the account exists, log in, go to your profile and start with the checklist below.

Before you start: visibility and your LinkedIn profile URL

Start by checking what a user outside your network can see of your LinkedIn profile. The public profile settings are where you do that. It happens that half the sections are hidden and nobody except your connections will ever see them.

In the same place you change your profile URL. The ideal one is simple, with your first and last name, without numbers, special characters, emoji or accented letters, for example linkedin.com/in/firstnamelastname. You can put an address like that in an email footer or on a business card without embarrassment.

One note before you start cleaning up: change one thing at a time. I described a case where changing the email, the description, the banner, the company, two-step login and verification all at once ended with a blocked account. You can read more in the piece on two-step login on LinkedIn.

Keywords: where a LinkedIn profile starts

Most people start with the photo. I start with keywords, because from them you build your headline, your About section and your skills. Describe yourself, your industry and what you do in a few sentences, then turn that description into short phrases someone would type into the LinkedIn or Google search box.

Why Google? Because LinkedIn profiles are well indexed there. My profile shows up higher than my own website.

How AI can help: paste your description and ask for a list of keywords your clients or employers use to find people in your industry.

Profile photo and background photo on LinkedIn

Your profile photo should be current, well cropped, reasonably professional (it doesn’t have to be a photographer’s session) and one that lets people recognize you in person. Don’t use photos from AI generators. It ends with a blocked account.

The background photo, or banner: use a company banner or one that shows what you do and gives your contact details. On paid accounts you can set three banners instead of one, shown as a slideshow. A profile is a business card, so the form matters less than who you hand it to. Don’t spend a week on the banner.

How AI can help: Canva AI has a module for LinkedIn banners, and LinkedIn also released ready-made banners for regular accounts.

Your LinkedIn headline

The headline appears next to your name in invitations, in comments and for people whose profile you view in public mode. The most common mistake? A copy of your job title. Ask yourself two questions: did you write it yourself, or did LinkedIn insert your position, and does it use the keywords people search you by?

How AI can help: give it a longer description of what you do and for whom, and ask for a headline no longer than 70-120 characters. Then choose one and adjust it your way.

Contact info and the Featured section

Check that your contact details are current and that you have a company email entered. Which address shows on your profile is set in the email address settings.

In the Featured section add a calendar for booking meetings, your best posts or links to company pages. This matters especially because since June 2025 the button with a link to your website stays only on paid plans (Premium Business, Sales Navigator and Recruiter). I wrote about it in the LinkedIn news from June 2025.

About: your professional summary

The About section is your professional summary and an extension of your headline. It should answer the reader’s question “what’s in it for me”, meaning show your value proposition, and end by repeating your contact details. The skills you list here must match your work experience and education, because the algorithm checks the consistency of a profile just as a human does.

You write the profile for a business client, not for a recruiter. Unless you are looking for a job, then it’s the other way around.

How AI can help: paste the descriptions of your positions and ask it to turn them into one coherent About text.

Work experience and education

The minimum is a current list of positions in a clear structure: what you were responsible for and proof, meaning an achievement in that role. A list of duties alone convinces nobody.

Enter your education from LinkedIn’s suggestions. Don’t invent the name of a university, check it on its website, and then the entry will link to the university’s page.

Be careful about entering too much. I once listed every university where I had lectured, and the algorithm stopped treating me as a consultant and digital marketer. It assigned me to academic lecturers, and completely wrong people started showing up under my content. I removed those mentions and came back to where I wanted to be. I described the whole story in the text about the LinkedIn algorithm.

How AI can help: give it your CV and answer a few questions about what to expand, and it will prepare the position descriptions. It can also generate a description of your field of study.

Skills and endorsements

Add at least 5 and at most 15 skills. Use LinkedIn’s suggestions instead of inventing your own names, and base your choice on job ads from your industry, because that’s where you see which words the market uses.

Then come endorsements. Reciprocity works: if you endorse your contacts’ skills, they will usually endorse yours. When you endorse, say how you know each other professionally. There are automations for endorsing skills, but you risk a blocked account with them.

How AI can help: ChatGPT is good at analyzing several job ads from your industry and giving you a list of skills to choose from.

Recommendations on LinkedIn

When you ask for a recommendation, first write one for that person yourself. It raises the chance that you will get one. In the request, describe the situation the recommendation should cover, for example a joint project or a training, because a general “will you write something for me?” usually ends with nothing.

Licenses and certifications

If you have licenses or certifications, add them and match your skills to them. After many trainings, mine included, you get an email with a link that adds the certificate to your profile on its own when you click it.

How AI can help: LinkedIn Learning will match a learning path to your profile and generate certificates, if you have access to it, for example in a Sales Navigator Core license.

Master level

This is where you do what most profiles don’t.

• Multimedia in work experience: a link to a YouTube video or a PDF that displays like a carousel. It makes your profile more attractive, and Canva AI and similar tools will make a PDF or a video from text.
• Interests and groups: follow at least four experts from your industry and be in industry groups. Perplexity can help you build the list of experts.
• Extra sections: you will never fill in all of them (I don’t have an academic league, for example), but it’s worth adding volunteering, projects or publications. AI will help write their descriptions.

How to check whether your LinkedIn profile is ready

Until recently the answer was simple: check your Social Selling Index. Since September 8, 2026 the full SSI report is visible only on an account with a Sales Navigator license, which I covered in the post about SSI behind a license. The “professional brand” pillar in SSI is largely about profile completeness: for clients with a well-filled profile I see 20-21 points out of 25 there, while empty accounts get 10-15.

What instead?

• If you have Sales Navigator, open Sales Navigator Coach and work through all the tasks until you reach the Expert level.
• Use the AI suggestions inside LinkedIn itself. They are in English, so if you write in another language, translate them before pasting.
• Check which industry the algorithm assigned you to: which posts your feed suggests and who views your profile. If you see the wrong people, go back to keywords.
• As an addition to your profile assessment you can use careerflow.ai.

A profile is only the beginning. Creating one changes nothing by itself if you then do nothing on LinkedIn, and I described where to start in the simple LinkedIn guide.

In the LinkedIn basics training we go through all the profile elements with examples from participants’ accounts. If you prefer a one-on-one review, I’ll do it as part of a LinkedIn consultation.

Sources

• LinkedIn: signing up for LinkedIn
• LinkedIn: public profile settings
• LinkedIn: Sales Navigator Coach