How to Turn Your LinkedIn Profile into a Resume: Step-by-Step

Import your own LinkedIn profile with the browser extension, check the entries, edit the resume, and export the format you need. Import and manual editing are free without an ExportMyResume account. PDF and Word downloads require Pro.

What the import can reach, and what it can’t

ExportMyResume works on the profile you are signed in to and looking at. It reads the rendered page: your top card (name, headline, location, photo, About) plus each section from its own details page — experience, education, skills, languages, certifications, awards, projects, volunteering, publications.

Two limits shape everything after:

• Other people’s profiles are out of scope. The extension checks that you are on your own profile and stops otherwise.
• LinkedIn loads long lists in chunks. If you have twenty roles or eighty skills, the import can stop before the end of a list. The editor says so when it detects this, but the check is still yours to do.

If you would rather see how this method compares with a profile URL importer or LinkedIn’s own file export before you install anything, the rundown of LinkedIn-to-resume converters lays the options side by side.

Step 1: Install the extension and open your profile

Install ExportMyResume from the Chrome Web Store, then open your own profile at linkedin.com/in/your-name in a normal signed-in tab. Click the extension icon to open its side panel.

What you should see: a panel titled Import from LinkedIn with an Import my profile button. If you are on a different LinkedIn page, the button reads Go to my LinkedIn profile instead — click that first.

Installing the extension and using the editor costs nothing and does not require an account.

Step 2: Run the import

Click Import my profile and leave both the panel and the LinkedIn tab alone while it works. The import opens each section’s own page in turn rather than scraping one long feed, so it takes a while and pauses between sections on purpose.

What you should see: a progress list with one row per section — Basics, About, Experience, Education, Skills, Languages, Certifications, Awards, Projects, Volunteering, Publications — each moving from Pending to Reading… to Success, and a counter reading something like “7 of 11 sections”. Closing the tab or navigating away stops the run; the panel says as much.

When it finishes, the panel shows Your profile is ready and an Open Editor button. If a section failed, you can re-run with Re-import from LinkedIn.

Step 3: Check what came across

Open the editor beside your profile and compare the sections before rewriting the content.

• Header. Name, headline, location, email, phone. The contact fields come from your profile’s Contact info overlay, and anything you have not filled in there simply is not on the page to read.
• Experience. Every role, with the right company and dates. Count the entries in the editor against the ones on LinkedIn. If your history is long, this is where a truncated list shows up.
• Education. Institution and degree in the right fields, not swapped.
• Skills. Compare the count. LinkedIn shows a handful and hides the rest behind Show all.
• Dates. Month and year on each entry, and the ones still running marked as current.

The editor also clears out some noise on its own — placeholder text, duplicate entries, and high-school education, and tells you what it removed in a notice with a Restore button per item. Read that list before dismissing it; a genuine entry occasionally lands in it.

Fix anything missing by typing it in. Click a field, edit, press Enter to save or Escape to cancel. Changes save automatically, and Cmd/Ctrl+Z undoes.

Step 4: Edit it into a resume

Select the content relevant to this application. An import can bring across details you want to keep on LinkedIn but don’t need in this resume.

The practical cuts:

• Switch off sections you do not need for this application. A section switched off is marked not exported and stays out of the file while remaining in the editor.
• Shorten the summary to the details that matter for the role. Keep relevant profile facts and rewrite broad descriptions into the form the application needs.
• Shorten older roles where their detail is less relevant, and remove repeated bullets.
• Reorder entries by dragging them.

Keep titles, employers, dates, and qualifications accurate. Check discrepancies against your records rather than changing a fact to fit the posting.

Step 5: One optional AI pass

Improve with AI runs a single cleanup over the whole document: grammar, non-English job titles and place names translated, bullets tidied, and the skills list de-duplicated. It opens a review modal before applying changes. Suggested skills and tools arrive unchecked. Check rewritten sentences as well as those suggestions for added claims.

This needs a signed-in account, and runs are capped per day (Pro raises the cap). The tool can still mistranslate a degree or blur a job title, so read the changes before applying them. A controlled first AI pass on an imported resume goes through what to accept and what to send back.

You do not need a job description for this step. Adding one changes what the pass does. That belongs to tailoring rather than to a first draft.

Step 6: Export and open the file

Switch to Preview to see the document as it will print, then use Export:

• Plain text (.txt): free. Good for pasting into application forms.
• PNG image: free, watermarked without Pro. Its layout can differ from the preview. It is an image preview; use an accepted text-based document for an application rather than relying on OCR.
• PDF: requires Pro. Real selectable text.
• Word (.docx): requires Pro. Editable, with its own typography.
• JSON: requires Pro. A backup you can re-import.

Open the downloaded file. For a PDF, copy a paragraph into a plain-text editor and check its contents and order; text selection alone doesn’t establish how another system will read the file. Check the last section and each page break. Open a DOCX separately in Word because it uses its own typography.

If the layout needs work, the Customize panel in Preview adjusts text size, line spacing, section spacing, page margin, typeface, paper size, and which side the photo sits on. There is no single button that squeezes the document onto one page. Length comes from cutting content first and adjusting spacing second.

You can complete the manual import-and-edit workflow without signing in and download TXT or a watermarked PNG. The optional AI step requires sign-in; PDF and Word require Pro.

If all you wanted was a file of your profile rather than a resume you will send out, LinkedIn’s own export is quicker — the free routes to a LinkedIn profile PDF cover what it does and does not include.