The mistake worth avoiding
The obvious move is to open your current role and change the job title. It takes five seconds and it destroys information.
Your profile then shows you as, say, Senior Engineer for four years — with no record that three of those were as an Engineer and that someone promoted you. Internal progression is one of the clearest positive signals on a profile, and editing the title in place deletes it.
The right way
- Go to your profile and find the Experience section.
- Click the + to add a new position — not the pencil on your existing one.
- Enter the new title.
- For company, select the exact same entry from the dropdown that your current role uses. This is the step that makes stacking work.
- Set the start date to when the promotion took effect.
- Leave the end date blank and tick that this is your current role.
- Save.
Then edit the previous role: set its end date to the month the new one began, and untick current position.
LinkedIn only groups roles when they point at the same company page. If you type the name freehand instead of selecting the existing entry, you get two separate blocks that look like two different employers — which reads as job hopping rather than promotion.
Controlling who finds out
Profile changes can notify your network, which is fine for a promotion and distinctly not fine if you are quietly job searching and your manager is a connection.
The control is in Settings & Privacy, under Visibility, called Share profile updates with your network. Turn it off before editing if you would rather not announce anything, and back on afterwards if you want.
There is also a per-edit toggle — Notify network — shown while you are adding the position. Either works; the setting is more reliable if you are making several changes.
LinkedIn reorganises its settings regularly, so a named menu path can go stale. The durable route is the search box inside Settings & Privacy — type what you want to change rather than hunting through the menu tree.
Whether to post about it separately
The profile update is enough on its own. A separate post is optional, and only worth it if you have something to say beyond the title change.
- Worth posting: what the team built, who helped, what the new remit actually involves.
- Not worth posting: "Excited to share that I've been promoted to…" and nothing else.
If you do post, do it a day or two after the profile change rather than at the same moment, so the automatic update and your post do not land together.
Common variations
| Situation | How to record it |
|---|---|
| Straight promotion, same team | New position, same company entry, end-date the old one |
| Lateral move, same employer | Same approach — stacking handles it |
| Title change with no real change | Edit in place; there is no progression to preserve |
| Company renamed or acquired | New position under the new company page, end-date the old |
| Promotion months ago you never recorded | Add it with the correct historical start date |
Keep the rest of your search as organised as your profile
One view of every application, its stage, and what needs follow-up.
See the tracker