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Your LinkedIn data is trapped. Here's how to get it out.

Good news: it's your data

You've spent years building your LinkedIn profile. Every role, every skill, every connection, every endorsement. It's the most complete picture of your career that exists anywhere. And for a long time, it's been mostly stuck there.

Not because LinkedIn hides it. They actually give you a straightforward way to download everything. Most people just don't know it exists, or assume it's complicated. It isn't.

Here's the short version: LinkedIn lets you export your data for free, in a few clicks, and the file they give you has most of what you'd need to rebuild your professional profile from scratch. The longer version is below, with exact steps and links.

Two ways to export

LinkedIn offers two export options. Both are free. Both start from the same place.

The quick one lets you pick specific categories — just your connections, or just your profile, or just your messages. It arrives in minutes.

The full archive grabs everything at once. It takes longer — up to 24 hours — but you get the complete picture in one ZIP file.

For most people, the full archive is what you want. It's one request, one download, and you're done.

Where to click

  1. Go to Settings & Privacy (click the "Me" icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage, then select Settings & Privacy from the dropdown)
  2. Click Data Privacy on the left sidebar
  3. Under "How LinkedIn uses your data", click Download your data
  4. Choose either specific categories or the larger archive
  5. Click Request archive

LinkedIn emails you when it's ready. The download link is valid for 72 hours. You can jump straight to LinkedIn's data download page to start.

What's in the archive

The full archive arrives as a ZIP file. Inside, you'll find a mix of CSV files (they open in Excel or Google Sheets) and some HTML files for browsing. Here's what matters:

Profile data

  • Profile.csv — your name, headline, summary, contact details, and basic account info
  • Positions.csv — every job you've listed, with titles, companies, dates, and descriptions
  • Education.csv — your education entries
  • Skills.csv — every skill on your profile, with endorsement counts
  • Certifications.csv — any certifications you've added (only if you have them listed)
  • Endorsements_Received.csv — who endorsed which of your skills
  • Recommendations_Received.csv — recommendations others have written for you

Network data

  • Connections.csv — every 1st-degree connection: name, company, position, and the date you connected. Note: email addresses are often blank because each person controls their own email visibility in their privacy settings
  • Invitations.csv — invitations sent and received
  • Messages.csv — your full message history (text only, no attachments)

Activity data

  • Jobs.csv — jobs you've applied to or saved, with titles, companies, dates, and status
  • Search_History.csv — your LinkedIn search history
  • Shares.csv — posts you've published

What you won't get: other people's data (LinkedIn only gives you your own), "Who viewed your profile," "People you may know," phone numbers, 2nd or 3rd-degree connections, or message attachments.

How long each type takes

Export type What you get How long
Specific categories Pick one or more: Connections, Profile, Messages, etc. Minutes
Full archive Everything above in one ZIP Up to 24 hours

In practice, the specific category exports usually arrive within 10–30 minutes. The full archive can take a few hours for most accounts. LinkedIn sends you an email either way.

How complete is it?

Pretty complete. The profile and positions data captures everything you've entered into LinkedIn. If you've been thorough with your profile — full job descriptions, all your skills, education, certifications — the export reflects all of it.

The gaps are mostly in network data: connection emails are often missing (privacy-controlled by each individual), and you only get your 1st-degree connections, not the broader network.

One thing to keep in mind: the export is a snapshot. If you update your LinkedIn profile later, the export doesn't update with it. You'd need to request a new one.

What to do with it once you have it

This is where the real problem shows up, and it's the same one covered in LinkedIn isn't a CV: the export gives you CSV files. Spreadsheets. Your career history is in there, but it's in LinkedIn's format — flat tables with column headers, not structured for anything beyond opening in Excel.

If you want to use that data to build an AI-ready CV — one that AI recruiters and ATS systems can actually parse — you'd have to copy-paste from CSVs into whatever tool you're using, piece by piece. It works, but it's tedious, and you lose the structure that makes the data useful.

That's exactly what Smart CV Writer is built to solve. Bring in your career data — from a LinkedIn export, from an old CV, from talking through your experience out loud — on the import page, and it structures everything into a complete profile that AI screening tools can read in full.

A note for EU users

If you're in the EU, EEA, or Switzerland, you have an additional option: LinkedIn's Member Data Portability API. This is a programmatic API (available under the EU's Digital Markets Act) that lets you access your LinkedIn data through code, not just a file download — see LinkedIn's Member Data Portability API docs.

It requires creating a developer application and going through LinkedIn's API setup, so it's more involved than a simple download. But if you're building something that needs live access to your LinkedIn data, it's there.

We're working on supporting the Portability API directly in Smart CV Writer, so EU users will be able to connect their LinkedIn account and import automatically — no manual export and upload needed. That's coming soon.

The takeaway

Your LinkedIn data is yours. LinkedIn makes it easy to get, the export is surprisingly complete, and once you have it, you're not stuck with spreadsheets — you can put it somewhere it actually works for you.

Download it. Upload it. Let the structured data do the heavy lifting.

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