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TL;DR
Your LinkedIn profile is a stack of sections, and the stack has a default order LinkedIn picked, not you. You add sections from the Add profile section menu, and you reorder only the sections LinkedIn lets you move. The movers are the mid-stack: About, Featured, Skills, Recommendations, Projects. The locked ones are your header, Experience, Education and Activity. Here’s the exact add flow, the two layers of reordering, and the order that makes the right person stop scrolling.

A LinkedIn Profile Is Two Layers of Sections

LinkedIn gives you two different reorder problems, and almost everyone conflates them. Layer one is the sections themselves, the cards stacked below yours. Layer two is the items inside a section, like the roles inside Experience. The add menu controls layer one. The Sort control controls layer two. Two layers. Two controls. Knowing which layer you’re trying to change is the whole game.

Most people open their profile, feel that something good is buried, and start dragging. Nothing moves, and they decide LinkedIn is broken. It isn’t broken. It’s layered. You’re usually trying to move something LinkedIn has pinned.

Here’s what actually moves, what genuinely cannot, and the order that does the work.

21x
more profile views when you add a profile photo (LinkedIn)
9x
more connection requests with a photo (LinkedIn)
40x
more likely to receive opportunities with a complete profile (LinkedIn)

Strong profiles bury their best work under the fold. The sections decide what a stranger can find at all. The order decides what they find first.

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How to Add a Section

Adding a section takes four steps, and it always starts in the same place. LinkedIn keeps every available section behind one button in your intro area, and it sorts them into three groups.

  1. 1
    Open your profile
    Go to your own profile. The control you need lives in the intro card at the top, the block with your photo, name, and headline.
  2. 2
    Click Add profile section
    A dropdown opens with three groups: Core, Recommended, and Additional. Every section LinkedIn offers you is in one of them.
  3. 3
    Pick from the right group
    Core holds About, Education, Position, Services, Career break, and Skills. Recommended holds Featured, Licenses & certifications, Projects, Courses, and Recommendations. Additional holds Volunteer experience, Publications, Patents, Honors & awards, Test scores, Languages, Organizations, and Causes.
  4. 4
    Fill the form and Save
    Save writes it to your profile immediately, and it appears in the stack below your intro. You can edit or remove it later from the same section header.
LinkedIn Add profile section menu, grouped into Core, Recommended and Additional sections
The add flow. One button in your intro card, three groups of sections, one Save before the section is live.
Pro Tip
The fastest upgrade on most profiles is Featured. It’s in the Recommended group, most people never add it, and it’s the only section where you can pin actual proof: a link, a file, a video, a post. Adding it takes under a minute, and it changes what the top of your profile looks like.
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How to Reorder Your Sections

Reordering has two layers, and the layer everyone wants is the layer LinkedIn restricts most. LinkedIn doesn’t hand you a free drag-and-drop for every section on the page. In desktop edit mode, the movable sections carry a grip handle on the left that you can grab and drag up or down. The header, Experience, Education, and Activity do not move. They’re pinned, because LinkedIn treats them as structural.

Drag behavior varies by desktop layout, and it does not exist on mobile at all. The reliable play: reorder what you can drag, and reshape the rest by controlling what you add or remove around it. If proof sits below the fold, the fix is usually not moving an old section but pulling a new one—like Featured—into the movable mid-stack.

Before and after view of reordering LinkedIn profile sections with drag handles
The reorder move. Grab the grip on a movable section and drag it up. Locked sections ignore the drag.
Pro Tip
The movable mid-stack is where the value lives: About, Featured, Skills, Recommendations, Projects, Courses. That handful of sections is the part of your profile you actually own the order of. Spend your attention there instead of fighting the sections that won’t budge.
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Reordering Inside a Section

Inside Experience the rule is specific, and it is worth knowing. You can reorder the positions you currently hold. That matters when you run two roles and want the relevant one on top. You cannot reorder past roles; those stay chronological and are fixed in place.

  1. 1
    Open Experience and hit Edit
    On your profile, go to the Experience section and click the pencil icon.
  2. 2
    Click Sort
    The Sort control only appears once you have two or more current positions, meaning roles with no end date.
  3. 3
    Drag your current roles into order
    Only current roles carry a drag handle. Past roles stay put.
  4. 4
    Close and check
    The new order saves immediately. Open your profile in a logged-out window to see it the way a stranger does.
LinkedIn Experience section with the Sort control and a reorder modal listing current positions
Item-level reorder. Only current roles carry a grip. Past roles stay in date order.

The same logic applies elsewhere. You can reorder the pins inside Featured, and inside Skills you can pin the three you most want read first.

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What Moves and What Is Locked

Before planning a reorder, know which sections push back. Here’s the honest map we use.

Section Movement Map
Movable mid-stack vs. pinned structure
Section
Moves?
Best lever
Header
Locked
Rewrite the headline; the position is fixed.
About
Movable
Drag the grip in desktop edit mode.
Featured
Movable
Drag it up, then reorder the pins inside.
Experience
Section locked, items movable
Use Sort to order current roles only.
Education
Locked
Chronological; nothing to reorder.
Skills
Movable
Drag it up and pin your top three.
Recommendations
Movable
Add the section, then drag it into view.
Activity
Locked (auto)
Generated from your posts; control it by posting.
◆

The Right Order Depends on Who You Want

Order isn’t decoration. It’s a claim about what matters to you. A stranger reads the first three sections of your profile before deciding whether to keep reading, so those three should point at the job you want next, not the job you had.

Notion Inline Banner7
Order by Goal
What to lead with, and what to bury
You are
Lead with
Bury
Job seeker
About, then Experience, then Skills
Unrelated volunteer work and old certifications.
Consultant or seller
Featured, then About, then Experience
Test scores and coursework.
Creator or operator
Featured, then About, then Experience
Patents and honors if they’re not the point.

One rule we use: would a stranger know what you do in ten seconds? If not, the top of your profile is working against you.

Pro Tip
Check your own profile logged out, on a phone. That’s the page most people actually see, and it’s the one where your order either holds or falls apart.
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What Belongs in Featured

Featured is the highest-value section most profiles never add, because it’s the only place you can pin files, links, media, and posts as visual proof. Treat it like a storefront window, not a folder. Pin three to five items. Make each one answer a question a buyer would actually ask.

Our rule: pins are artifacts, not adjectives. A case study, a teardown, a talk, a deck, a post that did numbers. If you want one clean asset to pin, build a one-page case study in Gamma and pin the link. A slide-style document reads faster than a PDF, and it signals that you build things, not just describe them.

Pro Tip
Pin the thing you want to be asked about. If three conversations start from the same pin, that pin is your pitch, and your About section should agree with it.
◆

When to Hide Instead of Delete

You have two ways to get a section out of the way: remove it, or keep it and change who can see it. Removing is for sections you’ll never need. Hiding is for sections that matter to some visitors and not others. A Volunteer section can stay visible to your connections and out of your public profile. We’d rather hide a section than delete one we might want back. Your profile isn’t a resume with a photo on top. It’s a page that argues, and the order is the argument.

Your profile isn’t a resume with a photo on top. It’s a page that argues, and the order is the argument.
Chief Content Marketer, on profile order

Once the profile works, the rest of LinkedIn compounds. The same discipline that orders your sections orders your feed: the right format for the right idea in LinkedIn articles vs posts, a rhythm you can actually hold in posting cadence, and when to use each format in our images vs video breakdown.

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