Ultimately, the best career and job readiness plan is to keep both the resume and LinkedIn profile updated at all times to reflect current role, job knowledge, experience, accomplishments, training, and certifications. By maintaining a current resume and LinkedIn profile, a worker can easily pivot and quickly transition to job seeker, reducing anxiety and stress.

You are going to want to update both immediately but leave the date ambiguous. For example, if you are still in the same year, leave it as such instead of putting an ending month and year. If you left voluntarily, share your motivation for moving forward in your letter of interest in a positive way. Employers are attracted to stories of authenticity.

While there is no rule on when to record the departure date on your LinkedIn profile or resume, 6 months is approaching the limits of that consideration. Particularly, if those 6 months cross over a calendar year, you should update your status in both places. If you only list your dates in years, not months (more common in recent trends), you can simply show the ending date as the current year.

I’m going to say you are already late! It’s a good practice to keep your LinkedIn profile and resume updated regularly, ideally every few months; this ensures you are always ready should an opportunity arise. As LinkedIn is a “live” online professional “marketing” platform, having a profile that reflects your current skills and accomplishments positions you competitively.

You can feel comfortable leaving a present date on your resume and LI for about 2-3 months, but be 100% transparent if you are interviewed. After a few months, recruiters will see it as being deceitful. There are some techniques to keep a present date and end date simultaneously on your LI, so you stay on any LI recruiter search filters.

Wait no longer than 2 weeks to update your career marketing tools if you are actively looking for a job. Recruiters won’t appreciate the deception when they uncover the actual dates of your last employment. Keep your last role on LinkedIn listed as “Present” and put the actual end date after the job title so you are still included in searches for employed candidates. It’s an honest workaround!

Keeping your LinkedIn profile and resume updated at all times is the best practice so these tools are always at the ready, so do it now. Recruiters will expect your resume to always be current and you may miss out on being found by recruiters on LinkedIn if your profile is outdated.

Six months is a while! I recommend having my client’s assets updated within a few weeks of a change or once a year so you do not lose sight of the value you provided. If it has been 6 months since you were employed, I would recommend noting a career break on your LinkedIn profile or add an experience entry to detail what you have been doing since you left your job.