Spring has sprung – and that may have you thinking about spring cleaning – your home, your office, or even your LinkedIn Profile. One of the questions I get when working with clients on their LinkedIn profiles is whether they should purge their LinkedIn profile of any experience that isn’t relevant to their current position.

For example, should you keep your college waitress position off of your profile if you’re now a lawyer?

Or what about previous legal experience that isn’t relevant to your current area of practice? Maybe when you first graduated from law school, you worked in litigation, but now you’re in a trusts and estates practice.

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Freshen up – don’t eliminate

While some people might tell you to purge those experiences from your LinkedIn profile to keep the focus on your current position or area of practice, I would ask you to stop and think before you eliminate those experiences from your profile.

First, they might present a gap in your experience that might raise some questions. But more importantly, there may be a way to re-frame those experiences or to talk about them in a way that makes them relevant to who you are and what you are doing now.

Changing practice areas or industries may show that you are flexible, adaptable, and able to change and to succeed in different roles. Or your seemingly unrelated jobs may have taught you skills that transfer to your current position.

For example, my husband, who is a partner at a law firm, always likes to see hospitality or food service experience on the resumes of lawyers seeking positions at his firm. He thinks having those positions shows that you can deal well with the public, which bodes well for dealing with difficult clients.

So if you’re thinking about spring-cleaning your LinkedIn profile, instead of eliminating past experiences, think about freshening them up instead. Think about what you learned from those experiences or what skills you acquired and how they might translate into making you better at what you do today.

If you want to learn more about how I can help you with LinkedIn, please contact me. Or grab a copy of my 47 LinkedIn tips here. Or pick up a copy of Make LinkedIn Work for You on Amazon.