A key part of being a professional in the modern age is having a strong web presence. One key component of your online presence needs to be a strong professional bio.
Great bios will tell readers a lot about you in a few key paragraphs, letting them learn key information about you and your skills in a few minutes. Yet what do you need to keep in mind when writing professional bios?
In this guide, we’re going to take a look at the most important parts of professional bio design so that you can create a polished professional bio. Are you ready to learn more? Then let’s get started!
1. Beginning With Your Name
Your bio needs to begin with your name and any qualifications that you might have. This may sound obvious, but bear with us: if you’ve changed your name after marriage, for example, you may wish to go by your maiden name, particularly if you’re known by this name. You may also wish to use a middle name instead of your first name, and so on.
Your qualifications can be included after your name, for instance, if you’re an MD, or, if you’ve got a title, such as Dr, you can add it before your name.
No matter which name you use, make sure that you keep it consistent throughout the article.
2. Deciding Between First and Third-Person
Some people like to write their bio from a first-person perspective, while others prefer a third-person perspective. Using either is fine, but if you’re writing a more formal bio, you should stick to third-person. If you’re writing a bio for something more casual, you could consider writing in first-person.
If you’re doing this for work, your employer may have a preferred style that they’d like you to use. We’d recommend asking your manager if there’s one that they prefer.
3. The Ideal Structure
In this section, we’re going to look at the ideal structure for a professional bio. While you can experiment with it, we’d recommend following the general flow of the structure so that you can create a great bio like this one of Kenneth Chien.
The Intro
Your intro is where you need to grab the reader’s attention. Introduce yourself, who you are, and any companies that you work for or have worked for in the past.
Your Professional Experience
Now you need to go into a little more depth about your professional experience. If you’ve ever wondered where to put employment history on bios, it’s right here.
You should talk about your current job title first, as well as the key duties that the role entails. It’s also worth discussing any accomplishments of yours in your current role. In essence, you need to showcase your skills and build your brand.
While you should discuss your previous roles too, you should keep it short and sweet. Remember, a bio shouldn’t be too long, or people will lose interest. We’d recommend sticking to accomplishments of yours in previous roles that are relevant to your current job.
A Short Personal Statement
In this final section, you can discuss yourself, your hobbies, beliefs, values, and details about your qualifications. You should find some way to make all of these relevant to your job.
For instance, if you volunteer at a homeless shelter, you can discuss how this helped you to develop people skills and a high degree of empathy.
You should also include some contact details in this section, like your email address and links to social media accounts.
4. Choose Your Photos Carefully
While photos aren’t essential in online bios, their absence will be noticeable. We’d recommend adding a picture so that other professionals can feel a little more connection to you. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that the wrong photo can bring your whole bio down, no matter how much effort you put into writing it.
If you can afford it, it’s worth getting some professional headshots done. These aren’t too expensive and can make a big difference to your bio. If you don’t want to spend money on photos, however, you can take a great professional photo at home.
We’d recommend wearing business attire in the photos and standing against a plain background. A background that’s too busy can be distracting. You should also ask someone else to take the photo: a selfie looks unprofessional.
You should also make sure that the photo is high-resolution: cropping a larger picture down can introduce artifacts to the image and leave your photo looking blurry. Your face should make up most of the photo.
Some people wonder whether smiling is good or bad in a professional photo, but it can be either. If your personal brand is serious, you should look more serious, but if your brand is more fun or casual, a smile looks great.
5. Edit Your Bio
When you’ve finished your bio, it’s time to put your editor hat on and start checking it over. Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors can make your whole bio look amateurish, which is the polar opposite of what you’re trying to achieve.
We’d recommend that you start out by running your bio through a program like Grammarly, which can spot most errors. Then, once you’ve run it through the program, it’s time for you to manually proofread your bio.
Only put it online once you’ve done both of these and are happy that it’s free of errors.
Writing Professional Bios Made Easy
We hope you’ve enjoyed this guide to writing professional bios. It can feel like a lot of work and as though there’s a lot of room for mistakes, which can make the writing process very stressful. Follow our tips, and you can remove this stressor and create a great bio to be proud of!
For more helpful and informative content like this, check out the rest of our blog.