A key aspect of growing your career is knowing how to showcase your strengths, experiences, and the value you offer a company. That includes using resume checkers, resume builders, and cover letter generators to write a top-notch professional bio and stand out in the hiring process.
The bio can be tricky when you’re only given a short space to work with and feel the need to stand out amongst others in your industry. So, where do you begin, and how do you optimize it?
We’ll guide you through the whole process in this article, covering the purpose of a professional bio, do’s and don’ts in the process, and short professional bio examples you can use as templates.
What Is a Short Professional Bio?
Before you start writing, it’s important to understand what a short professional bio is and its purpose. If you’re wondering, “What is a bio?” or “What should a bio include?” here’s a quick breakdown of the key components and objectives.
Definition and objectives
A professional bio briefly describes your skills, education, and accomplishments. It shows your value as an employee, professional, or businessperson.
A bio’s overall intent and structure can vary depending on where it’s going. For example, a professional social media bio may need to be more compact, whereas something on a company website may provide a slightly longer description of your professional experience.
Some of the most common places to put a short professional bio will be:
- Social media: There’s a growing need for professionals to have a presence on platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter. Due to the fast-paced nature of these platforms, bios are usually pretty short and to the point, and you’ll typically be given a character limit for how long they can be.
- Company “About” or “Meet the Team” pages: If you’re employed at a company that wants to have an online presence, they may need a bio for you on their About or Meet the Team page. These bios may be a bit longer than those on social media and would be focused on the value you’ll bring while assisting the company’s clients or customers.
- Resume bio: This is similar to a resume summary but will focus more on your top accomplishments and accolades. It’ll typically be a short two to three sentence description of your professional skills, achievements, and career goals.
- Professional website: Those who are self-employed or business owners may have their portfolio or services posted on a professional website. You’d want to have a brief bio explaining your skills, experiences, and the products or services you offer.
Key components
Now that you have the use cases down let’s look at the primary components that every professional biography should have.
- Your job title or the title you’re seeking: Your listed job title is a key indicator that your skills are right for a company or client’s needs. You’ll want to list your current job title to show your primary abilities. Additionally, entry-level job seekers or those wanting to advance their careers may also want to add a goal job title.
- Top skills: Listing some top industry skills is a great way to make your bio stand out. For example, accountants may want to list skills in software like QuickBooks and Excel and essential tasks like expense reporting. Or, if you lack experience, your bio could focus on transferable skills like customer service or inventory management.
- Accomplishments: Your notable accomplishments show what you’re capable of on the job. For instance, you could include some great sales numbers you achieved or how you helped boost client retention rates. Inexperienced applicants could also write about educational achievements or non-traditional work experience, such as attaining funding goals while volunteering with a non-profit.
- Your passion: What makes you passionate about your job or the industry you want to work in? Sharing aspects like how your desire to help people made you want to become a nurse will help you connect with organizations and hiring managers when they see your bio.
Preparing to Write Your Professional Bio
Before writing a bio, you’ll want to gather the correct information to present a well-rounded overview of your skills. Determining the appropriate tone and style to satisfy your intent will also be essential.
Information gathering
So, what information do you need for a top-notch professional bio?
First, you’ll want to understand your target audience and the purpose of your bio.
For example, if you’ve recently re-entered the job market and are trying to craft a great LinkedIn bio that could grab a hiring manager’s attention, you’ll want to understand the characteristics of your ideal employer and how you can show you’re a match for their needs.
It’s often helpful to research companies hiring for your job title and write down some common characteristics you notice in job posts.
Someone looking for a role as a social media manager may notice many companies want to develop a more customer-focused approach. You could tailor your bio to emphasize how your social strategy and posting style help companies connect with their customers and make them feel valued.
The next step is determining the right skills to include. In many ways, this will be similar to selecting the right resume skills. Again, looking at job descriptions for your title will be helpful. When you see trends like many companies requiring social media manager skills in Sprout Social and the Adobe Suite, take note of that to reference those abilities in your bio.
Lastly, you’ll want to find numbers you can include to specify your accomplishments. In the example of a social media manager, that could be things like how your user-generated content strategies boosted follower counts by 32% and average click-through rates by 43%.
You can tailor this process to different use cases. For instance, if you’re writing a bio for an about page on a professional website, you could tailor it to how your skills will fit your prospective customer’s primary pain points. Or, if you’re trying to gain more followers on social media, you could detail why your professional expertise makes your posts valuable for a specific audience.
Selecting tone and style
The tone of your bio will depend on its purpose and the platform you’re posting it to.
For work or resume bios, you’d often want to tailor your tone to the company. If you’re crafting a work bio for a company website where the tone is lighthearted and fun, you’d likely want to match that. The same goes if you’re crafting a resume bio for a company that uses a very formal tone in the job description. It’s a good idea to match that to show how you’ll fit their professional workplace culture.
When your bio is more personal, such as on social media or a professional website that hosts your portfolio, you can use a tone that reflects your personality while still keeping it professional or aim for a tone that you believe would connect with your target audience.
You’ll also want to consider whether you should write your bio in first-person or third-person.
Generally, the best practice is to write your bio in the third person if it’s in a more formal context or where you wouldn’t be introducing yourself. That would be when it’s for a website you don’t own (such as the company you work for), when you’ll be a speaker at a conference, or for a book or other literature.
Using the first person will be a better fit when the context is more personal or when you’re introducing yourself, such as on social media or a professional website that you own.
Crafting Your Professional Bio
Now that you know the information you’ll need, let’s get into the essentials of how to write a bio and structure it appropriately. We’ll go over the introduction, how to highlight your achievements, and ways you can personalize so it stands out.
Introduction techniques
When introducing yourself in a bio, you should know if you’ll write in the first or third person since how you start will differ slightly between the two.
When writing in the third person, you should lead with your first and last name, such as “Denise Sampson is a graphic designer with over seven years of experience crafting engaging visuals for social media content.”
On the other hand, a first-person introduction would be a little different. If your name is displayed prominently elsewhere on the website or profile where your bio is hosted, you could begin it with words like “I” or “my,” such as “I’m a software developer who is passionate about helping others learn Python.”
Otherwise, if you still need to introduce your name, you could begin with something like, “My name is Todd Labowski. I’m an architect who has been leveraging 3D-printed materials in my commercial building designs for the last five years.”
As you introduce yourself, it’ll be important to emphasize your role and professional identity right away so others know what you do. This should include your current job title, any education that makes you stand out, and potentially your current employer.
Entry-level professionals like recent college graduates may also want to include a goal job title here. For example, you could say, “I’m a recent graduate from Oklahoma University with a bachelor’s degree in exercise science, aiming to get into a role as a sports trainer to help athletes improve their performance.”
Highlighting achievements
Once you’ve effectively introduced your name and professional identity, it’ll be time to highlight achievements that grab a reader’s attention.
Remember who your target audience is when thinking about the accomplishments you want to highlight. You’ll likely want to choose things that are as relevant as possible to your job title, industry, or the career you’re striving to get into. For example, a teacher may want to highlight how their project-focused lesson plans led to higher test scores from students.
As you’ll notice in our resume templates and resume examples, we always recommend using numbers to describe your work experience. It’s a good idea to do so here as well to showcase the exact impact you had. In the example of a teacher, you could say, “I’ve always been a big advocate of using projects to reinforce learning since I’ve seen great results from project-focused lesson plans where they increased my students’ test scores by an average of 33%.”
Also, make sure these accomplishments tie into the overall message you want your bio to convey. If this were on a school’s website introducing staff members, the goal might be to reassure parents that your teaching skills will help their children get the best possible education. So, providing results like test scores or learning retention would be ideal for that purpose.
When you don’t have as much experience, you may need to get creative with the achievements you reference. However, you’ll still have many things to choose from, like educational accomplishments, volunteer work, or relevant hobbies and interests.
For instance, you could reference time volunteering as a youth baseball coach, where you used visual learning techniques to help players improve their batting percentages by 28%. Using an achievement like that would still showcase abilities that would make you an effective teacher.
Personalizing your bio
Just like in cover letters or letters of interest where you’d want to personalize your message to better connect with a hiring manager, you should take a similar approach when writing a professional bio.
Consider why you’re passionate about your job or the field you want to get into, and try to tie that into your overall message.
For example, let’s say you’re a personal trainer. A big part of your story and why you pursued that career path is that when you started working out, you lost 30 pounds, which helped you gain confidence and a better outlook on life. So, you want to do the same for your clients.
You could phrase that in your bio by saying, “Jack’s passion for the gym started after he lost 30 pounds and noticed himself having more energy and confidence in his daily life. When he sees clients smile after beating a personal best on an exercise or start walking into the gym with more confidence, it reinforces why he works hard to set up proper programming and diet plans to help others achieve the same results he did.”
Some other ways you could personalize a professional bio are:
- Sharing your values and how they impact your career. For example, your desire for accountability in business could show why you value a role as a quality control advisor.
- Briefly describe who you are outside of work, such as detailing your favorite hobbies and interests. Maybe you’re a big chess player, which will show why you’re a great strategic manager.
- Share your personal insights. What have you noticed while working in your field that others don’t always mention? What things have led to your personal success?
Professional Bio Do’s and Dont’s
You have the basic structure down. Now, let’s review some best practices and common pitfalls to ensure your short bio is as successful as possible.
Best practices
Some best practices when writing a professional bio are:
- Keep it concise: Your bio should be a quick summary of who you are and your professional expertise. This will be between three to five sentences or 100 words or less in most cases unless otherwise specified by the organization that’ll be posting your bio.
- Include the most relevant information: Consider your intent and the audience reading your bio, such as if it’s for a job application, professional networking site, or conference. Then, include the most relevant details, such as why your expertise in agile methodologies will make your speech at a conference valuable for project managers.
- Highlight achievements over responsibilities: Listing responsibilities sounds too bland and won’t grab attention. So, rather than saying you’ve been in charge of quality assurance for the last seven years, you should emphasize key accomplishments, such as using failure testing to identify 58% more product errors before launch.
- Update regularly: Just like you should refresh your resume as you advance your career, do the same with your bio. Regularly add new expertise you gain that’ll be more relevant, especially as technology changes with updates to the software you use or more efficient techniques are developed. Plus, update your job title and any other relevant information as it changes.
Common pitfalls
Some common pitfalls professionals run into with bios are:
- Sharing too many details: You don’t need to list all the top skills you put on your resume or every notable achievement you’ve had in your bio. Instead, focus on a couple of skills and one or two achievements that will relate to the audience reading it.
- Being too vague: Many professionals end up with bios that sound too generic when they don’t list specific skills or achievements. Rather than saying, “Beth Lancaster has extensive experience in the business world,” try for something like, “Beth Lancaster has been managing mergers and acquisitions for 12 years, using change management strategies to make new policy development 57% more efficient and effective.”
- Overloading with jargon: While you want to share your expertise, using too many technical terms that only someone in your role will understand will confuse an audience that doesn’t have the same knowledge. This is especially common when you’re in a highly technical field like a software engineer or medical researcher. So, aim for simple explanations with impacts that anyone can understand.
- Grammar errors: A bio full of grammatical errors will detract from your professional image. So, always proofread before you post or submit it.
Examples of Short Professional Bios
To help you put it all together, here are some short bio examples for different platforms and professions. You can use these examples as a professional bio template that you customize with your own details.
Bios across platforms
When learning how to write a bio about yourself, you must consider the platform on which it will be posted. Here are some biography examples for the most popular places where you might post one.
LinkedIn Bio Example
In your “About” section on LinkedIn, you’ll be given a maximum character limit of 2,600 to write your bio. That comes out to a maximum of about 400-500 words. However, you’ll generally want it shorter than that to ensure those who come across your profile read your entire bio. Somewhere between 75-150 words is a good range on LinkedIn.
Generally, writing in the first person will be best for LinkedIn since it’s less formal, and you usually don’t need to introduce your name since it’s displayed prominently on your profile.
Here’s an example:
“I’m a driven software engineer at CodeCraft with over 13 years of experience using Javascript to create interactive webpage designs.
The main reason I started learning Javascript is I noticed that a company’s website can make or break my feelings about them and whether I’ll make a purchase. This made me want to create designs that bring a business owner’s vision to life.
My techniques have yielded great results. Using dynamic content, animation, and progressive web apps tailored to each page visitor, I’ve increased consumer engagement by an average of 55% and repeat visitors by 39% for our clients at CodeCraft.
I’m eager to connect with others in the tech industry and share how we can use software design to level up business performance.”
Twitter Professional Bio Examples
Your bio on Twitter will need to be very concise since you’ll have a 160-character maximum on that platform. You’ll need to quickly introduce yourself and show why someone should trust your expertise, look through your profile, and follow you.
Here are a couple of examples:
Twitter Bio Example #1:
“Developmental editor who has reviewed over 2 million words, including working on 3 NYT bestselling novels. Follow for tips to make your writing shine.”
Twitter Bio Example #2:
“Ex hairstylist turned beauty brand manager. You can call me the brand stylist. I’ll show you how I use design and messaging to increase sales.”
Personal Website Bio Example
When you own a business or are self-employed, you may have a personal website where you need a bio about yourself. You’d typically have a short personal bio introducing yourself on your website’s homepage or in a dedicated “About Me” section.
Here’s an example:
“I’m Kim Li, a dedicated real estate agent passionate about helping clients sell their homes and get into their dream property. I’ve always enjoyed presenting elements that turn a house into a home for the right buyer, and I know just how important it is to come home to a property you love after a long day of work.
With my 97% positive customer satisfaction score and track record of selling properties an average of eight days faster than industry standards, I’m confident my property marketing and negotiation skills will get you the results you’re seeking.”
Example of a Work Bio for a Company Website
When writing a work bio for your employer’s “Meet the Team” page, you’ll typically want to ensure it’s formal and in the third person. Usually, these will be 100 words or less, but make sure you tailor it to the specific guidelines your employer gives you.
Here’s an example:
“Jessica Martin is the junior financial account manager at Peak Performance. As a recent grad from Colorado State University with a bachelor’s degree in finance, she’s ready to apply up-to-date loss prevention strategies, like internal cost control, to ensure businesses remain profitable. Accountability is one of the biggest things she values. That value has especially grown over the three years she managed the finances as a volunteer for Pet Support, a local animal shelter. She quickly realized how expenses rack up for an organization and the importance of proper management. You can trust Jessica will put forth the same detailed effort for your business.”
Bios across professions
Now, let’s look at how you can tailor your bio based on your industry’s needs. Here are some short professional bio examples across industries.
Example Bio for IT/Tech
Creating a bio in information technology presents unique challenges due to the highly technical nature of many of your daily tasks. You’ll often need to simplify your bio to make it easy to understand for a wide audience with different levels of expertise.
Here’s an example of a cybersecurity engineer bio that makes the impact of complex tasks like cryptography easier to understand:
“Connor Blake is a cybersecurity engineer with five years of experience in external threat prevention. His passion for digital security started at age 16 when his mom’s bank account was hacked, and he saw the hardships it caused. Since then, he’s been growing his skills, having received his master’s degree in computer science from Michigan State University and working on a specialization in cryptography techniques that mask business passwords and data access points so only internal employees can access them. His efforts have reduced company data leaks by an average of 67%.”
Example Bio for Construction/Trades
Construction and trade resumes must be updated often, as modern techniques and materials are continuously evolving, such as the growing use of raised access flooring. You’ll need to make it understandable for any customer or client seeking help on a project.
Here’s an example of a commercial flooring installer bio:
“Sam Peterson is a commercial flooring installer with Elite Flooring Solutions. She’s passionate about helping businesses achieve the right flooring aesthetics and sturdy installations to ensure a standout experience for all customers who frequent local stores in our community. With four years of experience installing raised access flooring to reduce installation costs by 35% and 98% satisfaction from our clients, you can trust that her expertise will result in an accurate job that gets done right the first time.”
Example Bio for Culinary
Foodservice has many health codes and standards you must uphold, so it’s essential for culinary pros to show their responsible expertise in professional bios.
Here’s an example of how a restaurant manager could do this effectively:
“Jake Kensington is the restaurant manager for Bella Cucina Ristorante. He’s always appreciated how a high-quality dining experience can help others connect and enjoy some of life’s biggest moments. Not to mention his love of pasta and risotto, which brought him to Bella Cucina Ristorante to serve up some of the best Italian dishes in New York. Using his seven-step quality assurance process and employee health training protocols, he’s helped maintain grade-A health code ratings and reviews averaging 4.9 stars out of 5 throughout his eight-year tenure.”
Example Bio for Sales/Marketing
Every sales pitch that you want to stand out needs to be relevant to your target audience. Do the same with your bio by listing some top industry skills and accomplishments showing your sales expertise.
Here’s an example:
“Bella Richardson is a sales lead with New Marketing Solutions. Having always had an entrepreneurial mindset, she’s had a growing interest in helping startups succeed and finding intricacies that make businesses stand out amongst the competition. She’s been using a solution-selling approach for the last five years at New Marketing Solutions to better connect with prospective clients’ needs and lead an average annual growth in sales of 27%.”
Example Bio for Health
Presenting expert knowledge and the ability to comply with regulations is essential in fast-paced health jobs. Whether you’re new to the field or have advanced experience, you’ll want to present those relevant abilities in your bio.
Here’s an example:
“Matt Keyser is a recent grad of the Medical College of Washington. Matt received his MD after completing his residency at Seattle Memorial Hospital and is now aiming to get into the geriatric care sector. He decided to pursue a career in medicine after working as a resident assistant at a nursing home in high school and seeing the diligent work the medical care team did to provide a better quality of life. He aims to use his patient care and diagnostic evaluation skills to do the same for every patient he works with.”
Short Professional Bio FAQs
The best ways to make a bio stand out are to include personal elements and ensure the skills and achievements you list are relevant to your audience. For example, someone seeking a job as a police officer could detail how they want to use their crisis management and community awareness skills to provide a safer community for everyone. This will stand out to police precincts seeking skilled and compassionate candidates.
When you don’t have much professional experience, you may need to get creative with how you present skills and accomplishments in your bio. Things like educational achievements, volunteer work, participating in school clubs, or your hobbies and interests can all provide relevant information. For instance, you could detail how your time in your school’s math club has given you precise abilities that will translate into jobs like data entry.
If you aren’t sure whether your bio should be in the first or third person, try reviewing the website where it’ll be posted to get an idea of how others have structured theirs. After that, if you’re still unsure, you can always ask your employer or the organization you’re writing the bio for to clarify.
Your professional bio should include your name, job title, relevant education, top skills, and an accomplishment or two that will stand out. You may also want to include your current employer’s name to give readers a better idea of who you are. Try to research things like top industry skills beforehand to narrow in on the most important details to write about.
In general, around 100 words or less is a good length for short professional bios. Typically, you’ll want it to be about three to five sentences to keep it concise and highly relevant to your audience. However, the right length can differ depending on the platform. For example, Twitter bios are restricted to a max of 160 characters. If it’s a work bio for your employer, you may also want to ask how long it should be.
Stephen is the co-founder and CEO of BeamJobs. He started his career in data fulfilling the dream of little kids everywhere: working for an insurance company. He then moved on to work in edtech for a company called Chegg before venturing out to start BeamJobs. Things have come a long way after countless “learnings” (fancy word for mistakes), and BeamJobs has now helped 2.5M+ people create their perfect resume. Stephen and BeamJobs have been featured on awesome sites like Business Insider, Chicago Tribune, Dallas News, Baltimore Sun, the Daily Press, Zendesk, HubSpot, and loads more.
