Did you know that you can now add a career break or gap in employment to your LinkedIn profile in
order to explain gaps in your resume or gaps in employment? LinkedIn rolled out this new feature
in March of 2022. And in this video, I am going to show you how to utilize the LinkedIn career break
feature to not only benefit you and your career, but I'm also going to walk you through exactly
how to use it and how to insert it onto your LinkedIn profile. If you are new to my channel,
welcome. If you are returning, welcome back. My name is Cindy Makita-Dodd, Career strategist,
and LinkedIn expert and today I'm going to walk you through the LinkedIn career break
feature. Make sure that you are subscribed to my channel for more videos like these,
and be sure to click the notification bell so that you never miss a beat whenever I drop a new video.
LinkedIn rolled out the career break feature in an attempt to allow job seekers to explain their life
experiences. As we know after the 2020 pandemic and just throughout this modern career path, many
people will take a career break, whether it is to be a full-time parent, maybe you were laid-off
from a job or maybe for bereavement for example, and LinkedIn has rolled out this feature in order
to allow job seekers to explain these gaps in employment, not only on their LinkedIn profiles,
but on their resumes as well. And this new feature is a step in the right direction because as career
professionals, we have so much going on and it's often hard to separate our personal lives from
our professional lives. And a gap in employment is now becoming more and more acceptable in today's
world of work. And LinkedIn has captured this in the LinkedIn career break feature. You might
be wondering what a career break is exactly. A career break is any kind of gap in employment
where you were not fully employed. Maybe you took time-off to be a full-time parent, or maybe you
took a gap year to explore new opportunities and travel. Maybe you took time off for bereavement,
whatever that looks like for you, any kind of gap in employment where you were not fully employed or
working for a certain amount of time can be considered a career break. The LinkedIn career
feature allows you to not only explain more in depth why you took that career break, but also
it allows you to demonstrate what new skills and experiences you gained during that break,
because oftentimes this can benefit your career. This feature also allows you to remove
any uncertainties or guesswork when a potential employer comes across your profile and sees that
there's a gap in employment. Using this feature can allow you to provide some more context and
even explain exactly what this break was about. So here's how to add a LinkedIn career break to your
profile. Head over to my LinkedIn profile. I am going to scroll to my experience section.
So here I'm going to click the plus sign. And as you can see, I have two options. I
could either add a position or I could add a career break. So let's click that add career
break button. We're gonna select the type. So here you want to select what type of break
is it that you took? And LinkedIn has various options here. Bereavement, career transition,
caregiving, full-time parenting, gap year, layoff or position eliminated, health and wellbeing,
personal goal pursuits, professional development, relocation, retirement travel, and voluntary work.
So I could select any of these. I could put in a location, not mandatory, but you can add that the
start and end date is important. So you could say whether you are currently on that break or not,
if it was a break that you took earlier on in your career, or maybe a few months or years ago,
you could put the start and end date. So maybe I could say 2016 to 2014, um, oh, sorry. Rather
2014 to 2016. I could put the months if I want to as well. Okay. And then the description is
where you have the opportunity to provide some more context into what you did during this
break. What exactly was that reason? So if, for example, I chose professional development. Here,
I can add a description on what I learned during this time? What skills did I gain and develop? So
throughout a career break, there's probably maybe courses that you took or different activities that
you engaged in or even maybe you were enlightened to the fact that you wanted to transition careers,
whatever that looks like for you in this description, you now have an opportunity
to provide some more context to that current or potential employer in this description section.
So utilize this, you have 2000 characters, as you could see, to add some more context and provide
some background or information into what happened or why you actually took that break. And of course
provide as much or as little as you want. Do not feel compelled to share personal information if
you don't want to, but it is a nice opportunity to explain anything that you gained throughout this
experience that could be beneficial to a future employer. You also have the opportunity to add
media. So that could be a link, or maybe you could upload a video or picture, maybe something that is
relevant to what you did during that career break. It is also great to add media to the section as
well. Once I am done, I can click save and it is going to add as a career break onto my profile.
So if I scroll to that part of my profile, if it was at earlier dates, it's gonna be a little
bit further down, but you could see it here. Professional break that I took, it was a career
break and it has dates. It says for two years and one month. And then of course the description is
gonna show up as well. So there you have it. That is exactly how you utilize LinkedIn's career break
feature on your LinkedIn profile. Have you ever utilized it or are you going to use it?
Let me know in the comments below, I'm curious to know. If you did find this video helpful,
please consider giving it a like, it helps so much. If you are not yet subscribed to my channel,
subscribe, click that button. I post weekly videos, weekly content to help you along every
step on your career journey. And I don't want you to miss a beat. I also want you to download
my free resource LinkedIn for job seekers, where I walk you through step by step on how to take your
LinkedIn profile from average and barely get any views to where you can skyrocket and actually have
opportunities coming to you. Click the link right below this video to download my free guide. Again,
this is Cindy Makita, and I will see you very soon. Bye for now.