People are coming to your LinkedIn profile to learn how you think.
If one of the signals you want to send is that you believe in sustainability and care about the environment, you’ll want to include sustainability in both your profile and your LinkedIn activity.
Here are a few simple ways to show your values on your LinkedIn profile.
Key Takeaways:
- The LinkedIn About section is the most direct place to state your sustainability perspective.
- Engagement carries more weight than content creation when it comes to showing values.
- Consistency across profile, activity, and posts is what makes sustainability a recognizable part of your leadership brand.
Start with Your About Section
Mention sustainability in your About. This section of the LinkedIn profile functions like a cover letter for your profile, and it’s the perfect place to highlight your values.
A short paragraph is enough. Focus on your perspective. What do you believe about sustainability, the environment, or climate? Why does it matter in the context of business or leadership?
Include Sustainability in Your Experience
If you have been involved in projects that touched sustainability, include them in your Experience section.
Keep it brief and factual. What was the project, and what was your role?
You are not trying to reframe your career around sustainability. You are simply showing that it has been part of your focus.
Use the Causes Section
In LinkedIn’s Causes section, you can include causes that matter to you. Sustainability is not one of the options, but Environment is.
Add Skills
The Skills section is another simple way to reinforce this. You can include skills such as:
- Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)
- Corporate Social Responsibility
- Sustainable Development
- Environmental Management
Just start typing and LinkedIn will suggest related skills.
Follow and Engage with Sustainability Leaders
Your activity on LinkedIn reflects your interests. Follow leaders and organizations in this space and engage with their content.
You can like posts or repost, but comments tend to carry more weight. A small number of thoughtful comments can go a long way.
This is a simple way to make your interests visible without creating your own content.
Share Company Initiatives with Context
If your company has sustainability initiatives, you can repost them. Maybe add a short explanation of why the initiative matters, or how it connects to your work.
Show How Sustainability Factors into Your Decisions
If sustainability is part of how you think, it will show up in the decisions you make. On LinkedIn, you can reflect that by incorporating how it impacted a specific decision. In tech companies, this often comes up in areas like:
Infrastructure and compute decisions
- Choosing cloud regions powered by renewables vs. lowest-cost regions
- Deciding between training one large model or smaller, more efficient models
- Selecting newer, energy-efficient hardware vs. extending the life of existing equipment
- Investing in more efficient cooling systems
Product and feature design
- Deciding whether to launch compute-intensive features
- Optimizing for efficiency vs. maximum capability
- Offering lighter versions of products with lower environmental impact
- Designing APIs that encourage efficient usage
Vendor and partner selection
- Choosing providers based on energy mix and transparency
- Evaluating suppliers on manufacturing practices
- Deciding whether to work with vendors that do not meet environmental standards
Pricing and packaging
- Structuring pricing to discourage wasteful usage
- Charging differently for high-intensity vs. efficient workloads
- Deciding whether to pass on the cost of greener infrastructure
Office, remote, and expansion decisions
- Expanding physical offices vs. maintaining distributed teams
- Choosing buildings with energy efficiency certifications
- Setting travel policies for global teams
- Making decisions about company vehicles
Your Sustainability Picture
You don’t need to make posts like this frequently – a couple times a year is enough. Just mention sustainability when it factored into your decision-making process.
When you regularly incorporate sustainability into your profile, your engagement, and your posts, you make it clear that this is one of your core values. That helps you attract employees and partners who feel as you do.