If you’ve come across this article, chances are that you’ve recently received a well-deserved promotion, so first and foremost—congratulations!
Achievements like these have to be celebrated, and besides sharing the good news with your friends and family, it’s also worth sharing it with the world.
Regardless of your industry or location, LinkedIn is the number one professional networking platform in the world, making it the perfect place to post your promotion news.
LinkedIn is also one of the most popular engagement channels for modern sales and marketing teams. Given the importance of multichannel outreach in business success, it’s definitely a good idea to keep your LinkedIn profile updated at all times.
No matter if you’ve moved up the corporate ladder at your current company or taking the next step in your career with another firm, LinkedIn is a fantastic place to showcase your professional growth.
Stick around as we explore how to show a promotion on Linkedin step by step, share the news with your audience, why it’s important, and more.
How to add a promotion on LinkedIn
To get the ball rolling, let’s directly start with the step-by-step guide on how to add your promotion on LinkedIn, and cover all the ‘extras’ later on.
Interestingly enough, after looking through numerous articles on this topic, I noticed that the information provided in most cases, well, isn’t really correct. After some digging, I realized that, in their defense, LinkedIn changed their approach to adding promotions several times over the last couple of years.
Before, there were several ways to add your promotion, but as of October 2024, there’s really only one way to add a promotion for both your current and new company.
Step 1: Access profile
Go to your LinkedIn profile from the LinkedIn homepage by clicking on the circle in the top right corner with your profile picture, and in the drop-down menu click ‘View Profile’.
Step 2: Navigate experience
Scroll down to the ‘Experience’ section which outlines all your previous and current occupations and companies you work for, in a neat chronological order. At the top right corner, you’ll see two icons—a plus sign (+) to add a new position, and a pencil to edit existing positions.
In order to add your promotion on LinkedIn in 2024, you’ll have to click on the plus sign (+) and add a new job position (alternatively, you can first click on the pencil icon, which will bring you to a new tab, and then click on the plus sign (+) to add a new position):
Step 3: Add new position
Once you’ve clicked on ‘add new position’, LinkedIn will open up a dedicated menu tab where you will have to fill out all the information regarding your promotion:
This is where it’s time to get a bit focused. Fill out all the required information such as your new Job title, employment type (full-time, part-time, contract, etc.), location, location type (on-site, hybrid, remote), start date, and tick the ‘I am currently working in this role’ box.
With regards to the ‘Company Name’ field, depending on whether your promotion is in your current company or a new company:
1. If you’re promoted within your current company, simply enter your current company and make sure it matches the one from your previous position on LinkedIn (there are many similar-named companies out there).
As long as you do that and ensure the dates are entered correctly (the new position starts when the old role ends), LinkedIn will automatically group them to create that aesthetic trajectory line showcasing your career progression within the organization:
2. If you’re starting your new promotion in a different company, fill out all the required information and in the ‘company name’ field simply enter the new company name. Once again, it’s important to ensure the dates are aligned currently, meaning the start date of the new job position begins after the end date of the previous role.
Step 4: Verify dates
As mentioned in Step 3, in order for LinkedIn to recognize your new role as a promotion, besides entering the right company name, it’s imperative to ensure that the dates of the new and previous roles don’t overlap.
LinkedIn has made this incredibly simple by including a new ‘End current position as of now’ box in the initial ‘Add experience’ tab, so rather than first going to your old position and entering a new end date before entering your new promotion, users can simply tick this box and LinkedIn will get the message:
Last but not least, write up your new job description, just make sure to keep it relatively short and to the point.
* As you can see, there’s also a ‘Profile headline’ tab for you to edit your existing headline given your new promotion, which is one of the numerous ways of optimizing your profile post-promotion that we’ll discuss later. However, this is a great first step and it’s super easy to get done right away.”
Step 5: Add skills/media
If you wish, you can add your new job position’s skills and media right from the ‘Add experience’ tab, though this can be done later on at any given time, which may make more sense given it will take some time to develop new skills, achievements, and showcase them in various media files and projects.
Step 6: Review & save
Triple-check that all the information entered is correct (especially the company name and start date), make sure all the necessary boxes are ticked (‘I am currently working in this role’ and ‘end current role’), take a deep breath, and hit that save button.
Congratulations, it’s official!
Now it’s time to share the good news with your network, which we’ll cover in the next section.
But you can start leveraging your well-deserved promotion right away to create new opportunities for networking, partnerships, and sales, or all of the above.