Is it helpful to add your qualifications to your profile?

1. 77

   Victoria Lynnposted 13 years ago

   My profile description is pretty brief--with just some of my background and interests. Is it important to put qualifications such as education, degrees, former and current jobs? Is it helpful to put more personal information about interests, philosophies, hopes and dreams? What would be the advantage of putting more information? Does google score a hubber any higher? Would it help in the searches? Etc, etc...?

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   1. 87

      kschangposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      No. A profile is not a resume / CV.
      
      You can put that in your Google Profile, but that's up to you.

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2. 76

   wildernessposted 13 years ago

   I disagree with Kschang.  If you can convince a reader, through your brilliant writing skills, thorough knowledge of the subject and friendly attitude that you are someone worth reading you could get a backlink from it.
   
   A good profile can provide information that you are indeed an authority that can be believed as well as set the tone for readers to like you.  A profile can be a resume in that you are selling yourself and your writing to the reader.
   
   If you could convince just 1 out of 1000 readers to spread the word it would be quite valuable.  It's a numbers game, and a good profile just might help.

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3. 74

   QuestionMasterposted 13 years ago

   I agree with both Wilderness and Kschang.
   
   Firstly - most readers will never visit any of your other work. They won't visit your profile. They will just visit one page, from the search engine, to get the information they are looking for.
   
   Secondly - Google can't "read" what's on your profile. To Google, the page is just a bunch of keywords and/or links - lots of them or a few.
   
   Thirdly - Wilderness is correct in that if you do have pertinent information, some readers who are after more in depth information may sometimes visit your profile. However this is fairly rare. What I'd recommend as well/instead of putting your qualifications on your profile, is putting a little 'blurb' in  your hub about your experience or qualifications to write on that topic, for instance:
   
   Xyz is a qualified pharmacist who has worked in the field for twelve years. She has published two books and is a member of abc pharmacy association. Her interest in [hub topic] stems from some of the experiences she had with a friend who had [disease].

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4. 64

   Lisa HWposted 13 years ago

   I think if you're, say, a pharmacist who will be writing Hubs related to that field then it makes sense to add it to your HP profile.  If you're a pharmacist who writes about everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, then whether you add "pharmacist" to your profile is pretty much a matter of whether you prefer to or don't.
   
   My think is, I've never had any intention of putting some types of personal details or personal background details online.  (The Google+ profile, or something similar, asks things like "last place of employment".  I'm not putting that kind of detail on any Internet profile.)
   
   What I started to realize, though, is that if I wrote about something on which I had a lot of personal experience and/or previous study (not specific research for a specific Hub), I didn't want to go dig up references that I hadn't used for the Hub, but I had to figure out how to let the reader know I wasn't just pulling information out of "thin air" either.  If I were a pharmacist, for example, in offline life (or in previous work), I may not have been writing about pharmacy, but instead about something I had a solid understanding of (like, for example, having a well behaved pet or dealing with loss in life - that kind of thing).  With too many different subjects doing a neat, little, blurb for each can be tricky. (Somebody with a couple of career switches, some grown kids, a few decades of living as a grown up, and some personal interests in life can have a lot of personal experience that's pretty hard to condense into something like a blurb (for reasons only someone trying to do that would really understand/see).
   
   So, I left my own "background" pretty much limited on my HP profile, included better info in my Google profile, and yet more info on stuff linked from that; and figured if anyone's really wondering what makes me qualified to write about something he can go look.  One issue/challenge I've had with writing from assimilated knowledge/personal experience, though, is that I feel the need to make first-person references (once considered completely unacceptable) in order to let readers know that I had "intimate familiarity" with the subject.  Even that, though, didn't let readers know some things weren't just a matter of personal experience, but also of study/work experience.  (Not everyone has such "complications", though.  (I'm not young, so enough time living as an adult tends to make things like experiences and work background complicated sometimes.)

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5. 55

   Dame Scribeposted 13 years ago

   It can be difficult to write 'objectively' with personal knowledge/experience for some don't feel badly. It takes practice. My own profile, I refer to knowledge and skills but to no specific 'industry'. We all have (or will have) many skills acquired over our lifetime it's presenting it to the public with a 'point' I believe that matters. People usually search for something to help them - just sit and think - will this help somebody? answer the what, where, when, why and how. Just have fun doing that

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