This is a blog post on Love Your LinkedIn Profile by Natalie Berthe. He thought his LinkedIn profile was fine after ten years. The course proved otherwise, one section at a time. Why experience doesn't exempt your profile.
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He's an advanced LinkedIn user. The course still fixed his profile.

He's an advanced LinkedIn user. The course still fixed his profile

He reviews business books. He has a whole YouTube channel dedicated to it. Which means he reads a book, tells you what he thought, and moves on to the next one. That’s the routine.

So when Leonard Goffe reviewed Love Your LinkedIn Profile, that part went about how you’d expect. He bought the book himself, on Amazon, read it, and had good things to say.

But I’d done something extra. I gave him access to the course, too.

Not to be nice. I wanted a neutral read from someone who knows both — does the course earn its place next to the book, or just repeat it? Leonard was exactly the right person to ask. And here’s the part that makes the rest of this matter: he wasn’t looking to fix his profile. He loves LinkedIn. He took the course to see what I had to say.

Then he went quiet. Off his own channel for a while. And when he explained why, it wasn’t the usual “life got busy”:

“What surprised me is how long it took me to complete it… not because the course was difficult, but because every few minutes I found myself going back to my own LinkedIn profile and improving yet another section.”

That’s the whole endorsement, right there. A guy who reviews books and moves right on to the next one. And he couldn’t get through the course. Because it kept pulling him out to fix his own profile.

Why an “advanced” LinkedIn user still had this much to fix

Here’s the part I love. Leonard isn’t new here.

“I do consider myself a fairly advanced LinkedIn user. I’ve been on there for like a decade… the improvements that I made after taking the course were remarkable.”

Ten years on the platform. Considers himself advanced. And the improvements were remarkable. His word, not mine.

People assume profile work is for beginners. The person who just made an account. The job seeker staring at a blank About section. It’s not. The people with the most to fix are usually the ones who’ve been here longest. They built the thing once, years ago, treated it like a résumé, and never looked at it again.

(Sound like anyone you know?)

A stranger explained my entire philosophy for me

Worth saying plainly: Leonard isn’t paid. He bought the book with his own money. I gave him the course. He earns nothing whether you buy either one.

“I’m not getting paid for this from the author in any way, shape, or form.”

Which makes it that much better that he landed on this:

“Most LinkedIn profiles, they’re written like résumés. And that’s exactly why they’re not working for people these days.”

I have been saying that for years. It’s the entire reason LYLIP exists. And here’s someone with zero skin in the game arriving at the same verdict after one course.

He kept going:

“LinkedIn isn’t about your job title. Nobody cares about that. It’s about how you solve problems for other people.”

Your title isn’t the story. What you did with it is.

Your headline gets a few seconds. Then people leave.

Leonard also nailed the thing I harp on constantly:

“If you have a weak headline, it’s going to stop people from looking at the rest of your profile… a strong headline will make people go there. A weak headline will make people go away.”

Your headline is the most valuable real estate you own after your name and your face. It is not a parking spot for your job title. It’s the line that decides whether anyone reads the rest of you.

He gave the same treatment to the Featured section (one of his personal favorites), the About section as the place where “the real story begins,” and the AI prompts in the course, complete with the warning I built in myself:

“Please don’t just copy from the AI… use it as a starting point to help craft your own voice.”

Optimize for AI and the human eye. Not one or the other.

So who actually needs to redo their LinkedIn profile?

Leonard answered that one too:

“It’s not just for new LinkedIn users. It’s for people who’ve been on there for a number of years and anyone who wants to improve their profile.”

If you’ve been quietly telling yourself you’ve basically got LinkedIn handled, you are precisely the person Leonard was a few months ago. Advanced. Experienced. And still stopping every few minutes to fix another section he didn’t realize was working against him.

The difference is he actually did the work. Most people won’t. They’ll read this, nod, think “yeah, I should update my profile,” and leave it exactly as it is.

Your call which one you are.

(The course Leonard couldn’t stop pausing is Optimize. Same framework as my private work, every section, self-paced. Fair warning: you may not finish it in one sitting either.)

Photo of Natalie Berthe

About the author

Natalie Berthe

Business strategist and author of Love Your LinkedIn Profile. 30+ years across startups, franchises, nonprofits, and consulting, now pointed at LinkedIn. She wrote the book because she couldn't find anything worth reading on the subject.

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