Most LinkedIn advice is written by office workers for office workers, which is why so much of it sounds ridiculous if you spend your day on a roof, in a plant room or under a conveyor. So here is the honest version first: plenty of tradespeople do not need a LinkedIn profile at all. Some do, and for them a short, plain one beats anything a career coach would come up with.
The honest verdict: who needs it and who does not
Does a tradesperson need LinkedIn? If you are a sole trader with an order book full until spring, a van with your name on it and customers who pass your number to their neighbours, no. Your work comes from local reputation, review sites and the builders' merchant counter. That is a perfectly good way to run a trade, and nobody should make you feel behind for it.
The answer changes as soon as somebody else does the hiring. A profile is worth twenty minutes if you are in one of these situations:
- You work for a larger contractor, or want to, and jobs there go through a recruiter or an HR team instead of a mate of the gaffer.
- You get work through agencies and want the longer, better-paid contracts instead of whatever is left on Friday afternoon.
- You are in industrial maintenance, facilities, utilities, rail or manufacturing, where employers hire technicians the way they hire everyone else.
- You are a site supervisor already, or you are aiming at foreman, estimator, trainer or site manager.
- Your knees are telling you that twenty more winters on the tools is not the plan.
That last group has the most to gain. The move off the tools almost always involves an application to a company that has never seen your work, read by somebody who has never held a drill. A profile gives that person something to look at.
If the person who decides whether you get the work already knows you, skip LinkedIn. If they do not, a short profile is the cheapest way to be found.
Who actually searches LinkedIn for trades
Not homeowners. Almost nobody looks for a plumber for a leaking tap on LinkedIn, and a profile written to win domestic customers is aimed at the wrong audience.
The people who do search are fewer and more useful. Agency recruiters who fill technical and construction roles spend their day typing a trade, a ticket and a town into a search box. Large contractors have in-house recruiters doing the same for supervisors, engineers and skilled operatives on long projects. Facilities and industrial employers, the hospitals, data centres, food plants and logistics sites, look for multi-skilled maintenance people and shift technicians.
What they have in common: they search by keyword and location, and they are short of candidates. A tradesperson with the right tickets listed is far rarer on LinkedIn than an account manager, so a basic profile gets found more easily than you would expect. (That scarcity is the whole argument for bothering.)
The top of the profile: headline and tickets
The headline: trade, specialism, area
The headline is the line under your name, and it is what shows in search results. Forget clever. Name the trade, the specialism and the area you cover, in the words a recruiter would type.
- Approved electrician, industrial and commercial installations, West Yorkshire
- Coded pipe welder, TIG and MMA, stainless and carbon steel, works away
- Site supervisor, groundworks and drainage, SMSTS, North West
If you are moving up, say so in the same plain way: "Carpenter and working foreman, looking at assistant site manager roles". Avoid "hard-working and reliable". Everyone writes it and nobody searches for it.
Tickets, cards and licences are the main content
On an office profile the degree does the heavy lifting. On yours, the tickets do. A recruiter filling a job on a live site often cannot put you forward without a specific card, so that list decides whether you appear in the search at all.
LinkedIn has a section for licences and certifications, and that is where they belong: one entry each, with the issuing body and the expiry date if there is one. Think of your CSCS card or your country's equivalent, an NVQ or journeyman certificate, a gas or electrical registration, the current wiring regulations, IPAF and PASMA, plant tickets, confined space, first aid, a supervisor safety course, welding codings, a driving licence with any extra categories. In North America it is the journeyman or state licence and the OSHA card. Use the exact name printed on the card, because that is what gets typed into the search.
Two cautions. Do not list a lapsed ticket as if it were current, since the first thing an agency does is ask for proof. And do not upload a photo of the card itself: a document with your name, face and registration number has no business being public, and the name of the ticket is all a recruiter needs.
Experience by employer or by type of site
Some people have had three employers in twenty years, others forty contracts through six agencies, and both are normal.
If you have had steady employers, list each one with your trade and two or three lines on what you worked on. If your history is a long run of short contracts, group them. One entry reading "Electrician, contract and agency work, 2016 to present" with the types of site underneath is clearer than thirty entries of six weeks each.
Inside each entry, describe the site and the scale instead of your duties. "Second fix on a 140-bed care home" tells a reader more than "responsible for electrical installation". Useful details are the type of building or plant, the size of the job, the systems or machines you know, how many people you ran if you ran any, and whether you worked nights, shutdowns or away from home. Mention the apprentices you have trained. For anyone heading towards foreman or trainer, that is the most valuable line on the page.
Proof: photos and recommendations
Photos of real work, with permission
Here is your advantage over the office crowd: your work can be photographed. A neat distribution board, a weld, a finished roof, a plant room before and after. LinkedIn lets you attach images to the profile and to individual jobs, and four good ones do more than any paragraph.
Get permission first, and mean it. Ask the client or the main contractor before posting anything from their site, and assume the answer is no on defence, pharmaceutical and data centre jobs and inside occupied homes unless someone says otherwise in writing. Keep faces, number plates, addresses and alarm panels out of frame. Never post a picture a safety officer would wince at.
Recommendations from the people who saw the job
A written recommendation on your profile is the online version of one site manager telling another that you are sound. The ones that count come from clients, site managers and foremen, people who can say you turned up, passed inspection first time and left the place tidy. Two are enough. Five mates who all wrote the same sentence do the opposite of what you want.
What to skip, and the twenty-minute version
You can ignore most of what LinkedIn nags you to do. Nobody hiring a shift technician checks whether you post every day, and you have better things to do at six in the evening. A long About section is not needed either: three sentences covering your trade, your tickets and what you are looking for will do.
The whole thing fits in one tea break on a phone:
- A clear, recent photo in clean workwear. No suit needed.
- A headline with trade, specialism and area.
- Your tickets and licences, each with its exact name and expiry date.
- Your employers, or one grouped entry for contract work, with the type and size of site.
- Three or four photos of finished work that you have permission to show.
- A message to one site manager or client asking for a short recommendation.
When a formal application comes along you will still need a CV, and a tool such as Postulit can build one from the profile so you are not typing your tickets out twice. Then leave it alone. Update it when you gain a ticket, change employer or finish a job worth a photo, and get back to work.