Has LinkedIn Become Too Personal?
LinkedIn feels different these days. Alongside the job changes, promotions, industry commentary and professional achievements, there seems to be more content about illness, grief, family, relationships and genuinely difficult things happening in people’s personal lives.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Work is part of life, after all, and expecting people to leave everything personal at the door when they enter a professional space has probably never been particularly realistic. But it does raise an interesting question: has LinkedIn become too personal?
There’s actually research into this. A study published in New Media & Society looked at the rise of what researchers describe as “vulnerability posting” on LinkedIn — people sharing experiences of struggle, pain and failure. One of the patterns identified was “triumph over tragedy”, where a difficult experience is shared and then connected to growth, resilience or a lesson learned.
If you spend much time on LinkedIn, you’ve probably seen some version of it.
At the same time, LinkedIn has been talking about changes to its feed designed to reduce generic content and engagement bait, with more emphasis on useful and authentic professional conversations.
And from a career-development perspective, that raises an even more interesting question: what does being “authentic” professionally actually mean?
LinkedIn isn't just an online CV anymore
LinkedIn used to be relatively straightforward. A profile was essentially an online CV, and most of what people shared was firmly connected to work.
That's changed.
For many people, LinkedIn is now part CV, part networking space, part publishing platform and part personal brand. If you're looking for a new role, changing careers, building a business or trying to become more visible in your industry, you're increasingly encouraged to show not only what you've done, but who you are. There can be real value in that.
For someone changing careers, explaining why they've made a particular decision can help others understand a move that might not make immediate sense from their CV alone. Sharing what you're learning, what interests you or how you think about your work can give people a much richer understanding of what you might bring to an organisation.
But none of that necessarily requires turning your private life into professional content.
Does personal automatically mean authentic?
Somewhere along the way, “being authentic” online seems to have become closely associated with being personal as though the more of ourselves we reveal, the more authentic we are.
But are those actually the same thing?
A deeply personal post can absolutely be authentic. But simply sharing something personal doesn't automatically make it so. Equally, choosing to keep parts of your life private doesn't make your professional presence less genuine.
Perhaps authenticity is less about how much we share and more about whether what we choose to share genuinely reflects who we are, what we think and what matters to us.
A professional identity can be built around your ideas, experience, interests, values and the way you approach your work. You can have a point of view, tell stories, share what you're learning and let people understand where you're heading without giving them access to every part of your life.
How much of yourself do you need to share to build your career?
This may be the more useful career question. Personal branding can sometimes sound as though building a professional presence requires becoming a content creator version of yourself: sharing personal stories, having opinions on everything and continually giving people more access to your life.
It doesn't have to.
If you're using LinkedIn as part of your career development, it can help to think less about how “personal” you should be and more about what you want people to understand about you professionally.
What are you interested in? What do you know something about? What kind of work matters to you? What are you learning? What perspective or experience can you contribute?
Those things can help someone understand the person behind a CV or job title without requiring you to share anything you would rather keep private.
Equally, someone choosing to share something deeply personal doesn't mean they're doing it for attention or engagement. Sometimes a personal experience genuinely is part of someone's professional story.
Perhaps, then, the more useful question isn't whether LinkedIn itself has become too personal. It's whether the expectations around building a professional presence have changed and whether people now feel they have to share more of themselves in order to be seen.
At Pick a Path, we spend a lot of time helping people think about how they position themselves professionally - on LinkedIn, in their CV and in the conversations they have about their careers. That doesn't mean constructing a polished online version of yourself or sharing things simply because you think they'll perform well.
It means helping people understand what they want to be known for and communicating that in a way that still feels like them.
Because being authentic professionally doesn't have to mean sharing everything. Where the boundary sits between professional and personal is still yours to decide.
Thinking about how you show up professionally?
Whether you're changing direction, looking for a new role or simply reconsidering how you want to position yourself, we can help you work out what you want to be known for — and how to communicate it across your CV, LinkedIn and career conversations.
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