The LinkedIn Version of Me (Professional on Paper, Lost in Practice)

There is a version of me on the internet who sounds extremely professional.

He is an IT Service Delivery Consultant with extensive cross-industry experience and (and I cannot stress this enough) high level Leadership qualities. He is skilled in Customer Service, Document Management, Knowledge Management, Project Coordination, Server Infrastructure, Azure, and, to name a few, about eight other things that sound like they were pulled from a corporate bingo card at random.

He did not write that bio. His brother did.

He approved it anyway, because it sounded like someone who knew what they were doing, and at the time, that felt like enough.

The Platform

LinkedIn is a fascinating place if you approach it the right way, which is to say, anthropologically.

It is a social network that has decided it is not a social network. It is a professional community. A place for meaningful industry dialogue and thought leadership and the kind of inspirational content that makes you feel vaguely motivated for about forty seconds before you scroll past it and forget it entirely.

I spent the better part of fifteen years on LinkedIn the way most people spend time in a waiting room. Technically present. Not really engaged. Occasionally glancing up when something moved.

What moved, mostly, was the content.

Oh, the content.

Executives sharing their learnings. Managers posting about resilience with the energy of someone who had just discovered resilience that morning and wanted everyone to know. Strangers celebrating their work anniversaries like they'd survived something, which, to be fair, sometimes they had. People announcing they were excited to share news that, upon reading, turned out to be a slightly different job title at the same company.

And the comments. Always the comments.

"This. 🙌"

"So well said. Sharing this with my team."

"You are an inspiration, [Name]. Truly."

I would read these exchanges and feel something I can only describe as: nothing. A complete and total absence of the feeling I was apparently supposed to be having.

Everyone seemed to be in on something I wasn't. Some unspoken agreement that this was how professionals communicated, in affirmations and bullet points and motivational paragraphs that somehow said a great deal while revealing almost nothing about the actual person writing them.

I never cracked the code. I didn't particularly want to. Its a different world to general social media. LinkedIn is a utopia where everyone celebrates everyone. Social media like X certainly aren’t as…celebratory of its fellow human beings…

The Participation Trophy

The most engagement my profile ever received was from LinkedIn itself, trying to sell me things.

"Your profile is being viewed! Upgrade to Premium to see who."

It was probably a recruiter. Or a bot. Or a recruiter who was also a bot. Either way, I never upgraded. Whatever was on the other side of that paywall didn't feel worth the suspense.

The rest of my notifications were connection requests from people I'd met once at a work event, ads for courses that would apparently make me unstoppable in today's market, and the occasional message that opened with "Hope this finds you well" before immediately asking for something.

It finds me fine, thanks. Still not interested.

And a lot of the time I’m left wondering “how do you even think I’m a good fit for your company based on a bio and meeting me once!?

What the Algorithm Never Figured Out

The LinkedIn version of me had a skills section. Colleagues could endorse these skills, which meant clicking a button to confirm that yes, this person does in fact possess the abilities they have listed. It is peer validation made frictionless. It is also, if I'm honest, almost entirely meaningless.

I was endorsed for skills I used daily. I was also endorsed for skills I had listed years ago and barely remembered claiming. Nobody audited this. Nobody asked questions. You clicked, I got a notification, we both felt briefly like we'd accomplished something.

The profile ticked all the boxes. It looked like a person who was going places.

In reality, I was eating lunch at my desk because it was quieter there.

The Honest Version

Here is what the LinkedIn version of me never mentioned:

That he found most meetings genuinely baffling, not the content, just the performance of them. The careful, padded language everyone used to say things they could have said in one sentence. The way a room full of intelligent adults could spend forty-five minutes discussing a thing and leave without having decided anything, but somehow still feel productive because the meeting had an agenda. Like, “lets have another meeting to discuss what we discussed in the last meeting”. Can’t it just be a email?

That he spent fifteen years being reasonably competent at a job he was never particularly passionate about, and that he stayed mostly because the alternative. Figuring out what he actually wanted, felt harder than staying put.

That the relentless positivity of professional social media bore almost no resemblance to the actual texture of corporate life. Which could be political, exhausting, occasionally brilliant, sometimes deeply weird, and almost never as inspiring as the content suggested.

None of that makes for good LinkedIn copy. There's no lesson in it. No three-point framework. No closing line about leaning into discomfort or embracing the journey.

It's just a life. A perfectly ordinary, moderately confusing, entirely human life.

No bullet points required.

After

I'm not on LinkedIn much anymore.

The IT Service Delivery Consultant with the high level Leadership qualities has been quietly retired. He served his purpose. He got me through some interviews. He convinced at least a few people that I was exactly the kind of person who belonged in a room talking about deliverables and stakeholder alignment.

Maybe I was. Maybe the bio wasn't entirely wrong, just written in a language I was never quite fluent in.

The person writing this is something else entirely. Still working out the job title. Probably won't put it on LinkedIn.

But at least this time, I'm writing my own bio.