This week’s new job means time to update LinkedIn. Previously, I’ve taken the view that all of my time with one company was a “position”, but when I look back at what I’ve done at Fujitsu in the last 5 years, it’s actually pretty diverse and better represented by three separate positions. That’s not a problem – LinkedIn let me edit the dates and provide details for new positions – but then I found that some of the recommendations people had provided for me needed to be matched to a different position.

LinkedIn doesn’t provide a method to reassign recommendations between positions – at least not directly within the user interface – but Garry Martin told me a way to get around the problem – this is what you need to do:

1. Select the position that you would like to move recommendations away from and click the Edit link.
2. Make sure that you have a copy of the details contained within the position (some quite cutting and pasting into a text editor should be enough) and click the Remove this position link.
3. When LinkedIn prompts for confirmation that you are sure you want to delete the position, click the Yes, delete button – as the site suggests, any recommendations associated with the position will remain, but they will remain hidden until they are associated with another position. Contacts are unaffected because they link to an individual person, rather than a position held.
4. You should see confirmation that the position has been removed – click the Add Current Position link.
5. Recreate the position that you just removed, using the information that you saved before deleting the original position. Click the Save Changes button.
6. You should see confirmation that the new position has been added – repeat steps 4 and 5 for each of the positions that you would like to add to your profile.
7. Click on the Profile link and select the Recommendations dropdown to manage recommendations – at the end of the list you should see some unassigned recommendations which were orphaned by the deletion of one or more positions earlier in the process. Click the Show recommendations link.
8. Select a relationship for a recommendation (i.e. the position to which it applies), ensure that the Show this recommendation in my profile checkbox is selected, and click the Save Changes button.
9. You should see confirmation that the recommendation has been updated. Repeat steps 7 and 8 for each unassigned recommendation.

After completing this process, you should have reassigned each of the recommendations that were originally associated with a position to one of a number of new positions.