A LinkedIn summary is the About section of your profile: a few short paragraphs, in your own voice, about what you do, what you have done and what you want next. LinkedIn shows only the first few lines and hides the rest behind a “see more” link, so the opening two sentences decide whether anyone reads on. The strongest summaries are written in the first person, lead with the work rather than adjectives, and end with an invitation.
Below are 12 About sections sorted by career stage, each with a note on why it works. The people are invented, so keep the structure and use your own facts. For the one-line label that sits above the About section, see the LinkedIn headline examples, where several of these people appear again.
| If you want… | Go to | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| If you want…The structure first | Go toWhat goes in an About section | ExamplesFive parts |
| If you want…Help with the first line | Go to15 opening lines | Examples1–15 |
| If you want…To find a job | Go toJob seekers | ExamplesExamples 1–2 |
| If you want…To start a career | Go toStudents and graduates | ExamplesExamples 3–4 |
| If you want…To change fields | Go toCareer changers | ExamplesExamples 5–6 |
| If you want…Writing work | Go toWriters and editors | ExamplesExamples 7–9 |
| If you want…Clients, hires or a board seat | Go toFreelancers, founders and executives | ExamplesExamples 10–12 |
What goes in an About section
Take a good About section apart and you usually find the same five parts, in roughly this order. They are the parts of any professional bio, rearranged for a reader who arrived on your profile and is deciding whether to get in touch.
| Part | Its job | Example line |
|---|---|---|
| Part1. Opening | Its jobMake a stranger click “see more” | Example line“Most hospital software is designed by people who have never worked a night shift. I have.” |
| Part2. The work | Its jobSay what you do and for whom, in plain words | Example line“I'm a product designer who builds scheduling tools for nurses.” |
| Part3. Proof | Its jobTwo or three specifics: results, named work, numbers | Example line“Shift-swap requests that took two days now take ten minutes.” |
| Part4. How you work | Its jobMethod, values or a little personality | Example line“I sit in on a shift before I open a design file.” |
| Part5. What's next | Its jobThe ask, and how to reach you | Example line“If you're building tools for clinical staff, send me a message.” |
Most of the examples below run 130 to 175 words, which is long enough to show how you think and short enough to read on a phone. Write in the first person: the About section is where you speak to the reader directly, and “Erik is a seasoned leader” sounds like a press release about yourself. Keep paragraphs to two or three sentences, because a single block of text is hard to read on a small screen.
15 opening lines that work
These lines do the one job of the first two sentences: make someone who knows nothing about you want the rest. Each is original, with a note on the move it makes.
- “Most hospital software is designed by people who have never worked a night shift. I have.” — A claim about the field, then the credential that lets you make it.
- “For eleven years I've made sure 40,000 paychecks a month arrive on time. Nobody notices, which is the point.” — Scale, then a wry line about the nature of the job.
- “I write the speeches people quote back to their CEOs.” — One sentence that makes the reader picture the result.
- “If your first 50 customers came from your own address book, we should talk about the next 500.” — Direct address to the exact client you want.
- “Three years ago I taught tenth-grade biology. Today I design the training 6,000 pharmacy techs take in their first week.” — Before and after, with the numbers doing the bragging.
- “I left bridge design for technical documentation, and I've never been busier.” — An unusual move invites the obvious question.
- “Every legal aid office I've worked in had the same problem: people find us too late.” — Opens on the problem you exist to solve.
- “I translate what engineers build into what customers can use: release notes, help articles, the occasional apology.” — The list ends on a small joke that is also true.
- “My job is to find the 2% of the budget that's quietly doing 30% of the damage.” — A concrete promise, phrased like a riddle.
- “I've negotiated 214 restaurant leases in Houston, so I know which corners have killed three kitchens in a row.” — Volume, then the insider knowledge it buys.
- “Short version: I fix month-end close for companies that have outgrown their bookkeeper.” — “Short version” promises the reader won't have to dig.
- “Before I was a recruiter, I was a candidate who never heard back. I answer every applicant.” — A personal reason that doubles as a promise.
- “I'm graduating in May with a nursing degree, 600 clinical hours and strong opinions about hospital coffee.” — Facts first, personality last, and both in one line.
- “Twenty years in the Navy taught me two rules of logistics: assume the port is closed, and write everything down.” — Experience turned into advice the reader can use.
- “I've ghostwritten nine books, and you haven't heard of me. That's how it's supposed to work.” — The paradox of the job, stated with confidence.
Notice what none of them do: open with “I am a results-driven professional with over ten years of experience.” That sentence uses the most valuable space on the profile to say nothing a reader could picture. The same logic drives a good elevator pitch: the first sentence decides whether anyone wants the second.
About sections for job seekers
When you're looking, the About section does what a cover letter does for every recruiter at once: shows the result you're proud of, says plainly what happened, and names the role you want.
For four years I've been the person software customers call when they're thinking about leaving.
As a customer success manager at Brightline, a scheduling platform for veterinary clinics, I looked after 85 accounts worth $3.1 million a year. When I joined, about one clinic in five canceled in its first year. I rebuilt onboarding around each clinic's first busy Monday instead of a feature tour, set up check-ins at 30, 60 and 90 days, and wrote the help articles customers kept asking for. First-year churn fell by a third.
What I'm good at: reading a usage report and spotting the account that is quietly giving up, running the renewal call nobody wants to have, and explaining software to people with fourteen other things to do.
Brightline cut its customer team in May, and I'm looking for my next CSM role at a B2B SaaS company, ideally one that sells to small businesses. I'm in Minneapolis and open to remote work. My email is in my contact info, and I reply the same day.
Why it works. The first line describes the job the way a customer would feel it. The churn number comes with the method behind it, which makes it believable, and the layoff gets one plain sentence near the end, after the reader has already seen what she can do.
After six years at home with my kids, I'm returning to accounting, and I'd rather say that in the first line than leave you guessing about the gap.
Before the break I spent four years in public accounting and three as a staff accountant at a construction supply company, where I ran month-end close, payroll for 120 employees and audit prep. During the break I kept my hands in. As treasurer of our elementary school's PTA I managed a $90,000 budget and two fundraisers a year, and an outside reviewer signed off on the books without a single adjustment. I've also completed QuickBooks Online certification and a refresher course in current revenue and lease accounting.
I'm looking for a staff or senior accountant role in Raleigh, full-time or 30 hours a week. I'm organized and ready, and I've had six years of practice negotiating with people who don't want to do what I ask.
After taking some time away from my career to focus on my family, I am excited to re-enter the workforce and bring my skills to a new opportunity.
Why it works. Both versions name the gap, but the weak one stops there: no work, no evidence, no direction. The strong one gives all three. The work is specific (month-end close, payroll for 120 employees, audit prep). The evidence shows her skills are current: a $90,000 PTA budget that passed an outside review without an adjustment, a QuickBooks Online certification and a refresher in revenue and lease accounting. The direction is a title, a city and the hours she wants. The closing joke lands because everything before it is so practical.
Examples for students and graduates
A student About section can't lean on job titles, so it leans on one project told well. Pick the thing you built, ran or reported, and give it a number.
I'm a computer science senior graduating in May 2027, and I like building software for people who are in a hurry.
My best-known project is NextShuttle, a bus-arrival app I built with two friends after waiting 25 minutes one February for a campus shuttle that never came. It reads the shuttle's GPS feed, predicts arrivals to within about a minute and has around 3,000 weekly users. Building it taught me more than any class about caching, background jobs and what happens when a data feed dies during a snowstorm.
Last summer I interned on the payments team at a software company in Burlington, where I wrote and tested a refund service in Python.
I'm looking for new-grad software engineering roles, backend or full stack, starting summer 2027. I'm happy to walk anyone through the app, the code or the snowstorm postmortem.
Why it works. The app has users, a reason to exist and a failure the student learned from, which is what an engineering manager wants to hear about. Offering the postmortem is a small, confident move that invites a conversation.
I covered city council for my campus daily for two years. That means 61 meetings, three city budgets read line by line, and one story about a $2 million parking garage the council had quietly canceled.
I graduated in May with a journalism degree and a minor in statistics, because I would rather check the numbers than quote someone else's. My clips include accountability reporting, breaking news and a series on rural hospital closures that four newspapers in the state picked up.
I'm looking for a reporting job at a daily or a nonprofit newsroom, and I'll move for the right beat: local government, courts or health. My clips are on my website. Editors, I'd love to hear from you, and I can start in two weeks.
Why it works. The opening counts what most graduates only describe. The statistics minor gets a reason, and the ending answers the two questions an editor has about a new hire: where will you go, and when can you start?
Examples for career changers
A career changer's About section has one job above all: make the old career read as preparation for the new one. Say what carries over, then prove you have already started.
For nine years I taught eighth-grade science in Tucson, which is another way of saying I designed about 1,400 lessons for audiences who did not choose to be there.
That is the skill I'm bringing to instructional design. A good lesson and a good training course have the same bones: a clear objective, a reason to care in the first five minutes, practice before the test, and feedback that arrives while it can still help. Over the past year I've built two courses for adults, a forklift safety module for a regional distributor and onboarding for a 40-person dental group, both in Storyline and Rise.
What I don't need to learn: how to explain something three ways, how to keep a skeptical room awake after lunch, or how to tell from people's faces that a slide isn't working.
I'm looking for an instructional designer role in corporate learning and development, remote or in Tucson. My portfolio has both courses, with before-and-after quiz scores.
Why it works. The first sentence reframes teaching as design, which is the whole argument. The “same bones” paragraph shows she understands the new field, and the two real courses prove she is already doing the work, not just hoping to.
I spent five years in hospital billing, where I learned that most denied insurance claims are denied for boring reasons: a missing code, a date in the wrong field, an authorization that expired the day before surgery.
So I started counting them. With SQL and a lot of exported spreadsheets, I built a weekly denial report for our revenue team. It showed that three clinics produced half of all denials, and fixing their intake forms recovered about $410,000 in the first year.
That report turned into a new career. I've since finished a data analytics certificate, rebuilt the report in Tableau and taken on dashboards for scheduling and supply costs.
Now I'm looking for a data analyst role in healthcare, at a hospital, an insurer or a health tech company, anywhere that knowing what a claim actually looks like is an advantage. Based in Columbus and open to hybrid work.
Why it works. The opening teaches the reader something, which is the quickest way to sound like an expert. The change of career is told as a single story with a dollar figure, and the last paragraph turns the old job into the reason to hire her.
Examples for writers and editors
Writers get read more closely than anyone, so the About section is also a writing sample. Show the kind of sentence you write for clients, and name the forms, the readers and the results.
I've ghostwritten for more than 40 founders and executives since 2017, and you have probably read some of it without knowing.
Most of my clients have the same problem: they know their field cold and have no time to write about it. So we talk. I interview them for an hour a month, keep a running file of their stories, opinions and turns of phrase, and turn it into LinkedIn posts, op-eds and keynote drafts that sound like them on a good day. Their colleagues ask how they found the time. They didn't. They found me.
Clients have included a hospital system CEO, two climate-tech founders and the managing partner of a 300-lawyer firm. Their op-eds have run in national newspapers and trade journals.
I take on six clients at a time. If you're an executive with more to say than time to say it, send me the one opinion you most want people to hear.
Why it works. It describes the process, which is what a nervous first-time client needs to picture. Client types stand in for names a ghostwriter can't share, and the closing ask is a small, specific task rather than “contact me.” For the business side of this work, see how to become a ghostwriter.
I write the documentation developers read when they would rather be writing code: API references, SDK guides, quickstarts and release notes.
For five years I've been the first technical writer at Tessellate, which makes mapping tools for app developers. When I started, the docs were a 600-page wiki, a third of it out of date. Today they're 180 pages, built from the same repository as the code, and every code sample is tested before release. Support tickets tagged “docs” fell by 45%, and the quickstart gets a new developer to a working map in under ten minutes.
I do my best work on teams that treat docs as part of the product. I read pull requests, sit in on design reviews and push back when an API is hard to explain, because that usually means it is hard to use.
I'm open to senior or lead technical writer roles at developer-tools companies, and always glad to talk docs with someone who has just inherited a wiki.
Why it works. Shrinking 600 pages to 180 is a result any engineering leader understands. The third paragraph gives a working philosophy in one sentence, and the last line keeps the door open to people who aren't hiring yet.
I'm a freelance journalist covering food, farming and the people who work in both. For eight years I've reported from meatpacking towns, dairy barns, farmworker housing and test kitchens for national magazines, newspapers and public radio.
Stories I'm proudest of: how a heat wave changed shift schedules at Midwest poultry plants, a profile of the last family-run cannery in Washington state, and a radio series on farmers who swapped corn for hazelnuts. I report in English and Spanish and shoot my own photos when an outlet needs them.
Editors: I pitch carefully, file clean copy on time and get along with fact-checkers. My clips are on my website.
Sources: if you work in food or agriculture and know something people should hear, you can reach me confidentially by email.
Why it works. A journalist has two audiences, and this one addresses both by name. The three stories show range in a single sentence, and the line to sources turns the profile into a way to find the next story.
Freelancers, founders and executives
When you sell your own services, run a company or sit at the top of one, the About section is for clients, candidates, investors and peers. Say who you are a good fit for, and who you are not.
I'm a fractional CFO for venture-backed startups between their seed round and their Series B, the stage when the spreadsheet a founder built at midnight starts running the company.
I spent twelve years in finance before going independent: four in audit, six at a logistics software company that grew from 30 to 400 people, and two as its CFO. Since 2021 I've worked with 14 startups, two or three at a time, usually on some mix of a financial model the board can trust, a monthly close measured in days instead of weeks, a clean fundraising data room and the first audit.
I'm a good fit if you want someone senior one or two days a week and aren't ready for a full-time CFO. I'm not a good fit if you need someone to make the numbers say what you'd like them to.
Why it works. The opening defines the client by stage and by pain, so the right founder recognizes themselves. The “not a good fit” line screens out bad clients and, because it is about honesty, makes good ones trust her more.
Before I started Gridline, I spent nine years as a project engineer on hospital and school construction, and most of my days went to one problem: the electricians were ready, the drywall crew wasn't, and nobody knew until the morning.
Gridline is scheduling software for subcontractors. Each trade on a job sees the real sequence of work, flags a delay the moment it happens and reshuffles crews without a phone tree. We launched in 2024, raised a seed round last year, and now run schedules for 140 subcontractors on jobs in Texas and Arizona.
We're a team of 11 in Austin, hiring two backend engineers and a customer success lead who has worked in construction. If you've ever stood on a site at 6 a.m. waiting for a delivery that isn't coming, you already understand what we're building.
Why it works. The founder's story is the product's reason to exist, told in one scene. Traction gets one factual sentence, and the hiring paragraph speaks to the exact candidates the company wants by naming an experience only they have had.
I started my career as an ICU nurse, and I still think like one: what does the patient in front of us need, and what is getting in the way?
Today I'm CEO of Harlan Ridge Medical Center, a 400-bed teaching hospital in western Pennsylvania with 4,200 employees. Since 2021 we have reopened our maternity unit, cut emergency department waits by nearly an hour and raised starting pay for nursing assistants three years in a row. None of that was my doing alone, and our staff would tell you I say so often.
I post here about running a community hospital: what has worked, what hasn't and what we would do differently. If you lead a hospital and want to compare notes, or you're a nurse thinking about leadership, I'd be glad to hear from you.
Why it works. An executive About section is read by employees as closely as by peers, and this one is written for both. The nursing start earns credibility with staff, the results are ones patients would notice, and the credit-sharing line sounds like a person rather than a press office.
One About section, before and after
The most common first draft is a résumé summary pasted into the About box, in the third person, made of qualities instead of facts.
Erik Sandoval is a highly motivated, results-oriented operations leader with over 12 years of experience in dynamic logistics environments. He is skilled in team leadership, process improvement, strategic planning and stakeholder management. Erik is passionate about driving operational excellence and delivering value to customers. He is a strong communicator and a team player who thrives under pressure. Seeking new opportunities to grow.
I run warehouses. For the past 12 years that has meant three distribution centers for a regional grocery chain, the largest a 220,000-square-foot building that ships to 90 stores every night.
The work I'm proudest of is unglamorous: a slotting redesign that cut picking errors by 40%, a training program that gets seasonal hires forklift-certified in a week, and a night shift people actually ask to join.
I'm looking for a general manager or director of operations role at a distribution company in Texas. If your building has a problem nobody has solved, I'd like to hear about it.
What changed. The skills list is gone, because the results show the skills. “Thrives under pressure” became a night shift people want to join, which is show, don't tell applied to a career. And the vague “new opportunities” became a title, an industry and a state.
Write yours in five steps
- Pick one reader
A recruiter for your next role, a client, an editor, a future hire. You can't write for all of them at once, and the section reads better when it is clearly addressed to someone.
- List the facts before you write
Your role in plain words, who you do it for, three results with a number or a name attached, and what you want next. A small table with one row per part helps: an empty row shows what the draft is missing before you write a sentence of it.
- Draft the middle first
Write the work, the proof and how you work, in two or three short paragraphs, in the first person. Keep the tone of voice you would use with a respected colleague over coffee.
- Write the ending, then the opening
End with one clear ask: the role you want, the client you're looking for, the message you hope to get. Then find your opening line in the proof and move it to the top.
- Read it as a stranger, on a phone
Look at the first lines alone, the way LinkedIn shows them before “see more.” Would you click? Then read the whole thing on a phone and break up any paragraph that fills the screen.
For a second reading, you can ask the Strokes Assistant to review the section as a recruiter who has never heard of you. It tells you what is unclear, unsupported or repetitive, such as a claim with no number behind it.
Applying for one specific job? The About section speaks to everyone who lands on your profile, so keep it general and put the tailored argument in a cover letter instead.
About section mistakes to avoid
- Pasting your résumé. Bullets of duties belong in the Experience section. The About section is where you connect them into a story.
- Writing in the third person. It reads as if someone else wrote your profile. Save third person for team pages and conference programs.
- Spending the first lines on adjectives. They are the only lines most visitors see. Put a fact or a claim there.
- A list of keywords. Twenty skills separated by commas read like a form. Name the skills that matter inside sentences about the work you did with them.
- No ask. If the section doesn't say what you want, a reader who would have helped doesn't know how.
- Forgetting it exists. An About section that still describes the job you left two years ago undercuts everything else on the profile. Reread it whenever your headline changes.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a LinkedIn summary be?
Long enough for the five parts, in three or four short paragraphs. The examples on this page run 127 to 173 words, and 300 is plenty for most careers. LinkedIn sets its own maximum for the section, but the limit that matters is the reader's patience: someone skimming profiles decides from the first lines whether to read on.
Is a LinkedIn summary the same as the About section?
Yes. People still search for “LinkedIn summary,” but on the profile itself the section is headed About. It is the main place on your profile for a first-person account of your work, while the headline under your name does the one-line version and the Experience section holds the job-by-job detail.
How do I write a LinkedIn summary with no experience?
Use what you have done instead of jobs you haven't had: a class project with users, a volunteer role with a budget, a part-time job with a number attached, a portfolio piece. Tell one of them well, with a result, then say plainly what kind of role you want and when you can start.
Should my LinkedIn summary say I'm looking for a job?
If you are searching openly, yes, near the end, with the role, the location and when you can start. If your current employer doesn't know you are looking, leave the search out, since anyone can read your profile, and keep the section about your work and the kind of problems you like to solve.
