What Comes After LinkedIn

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Whether or not you believe that flawed Anthropic graph or Jack Dorsey’s stated reasons for laying off 40 percent of his staff at Block, the message is the same: AI is doing more of the rote click-work that sustained the laptop class. The knowledge workers who thrive will be the ones who can add something extra—judgment, taste, and expertise.

The problem is that most of us have no good way to prove those things, and we’re not very good at it. For decades, brand names did the heavy lifting. Previous experience at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs were buzzwords that signaled to a hiring manager: This person can build a model and make slides, and someone selective chose them.

But brand names don’t work as a heuristic for expertise anymore. Was that Google alumnus a pixel pusher or a genuine decision maker? The soft skills that matter most in an AI-augmented workplace are invisible on a traditional resume.

One answer is portfolios. Not a portfolio in the sense of a portfolio career—a word that many knowledge workers have embraced as they move away from relying on one employer and pick up advisory roles and solopreneurship. I mean a portfolio as a body of work that proves your value beyond your work history. A collection of artifacts that show how you think, just like creative professionals showcase their design or artistic work.

As a journalist and editor, I write a newsletter about people using writing to build things, and I post on LinkedIn, all of which I consider to be part of my portfolio that helps people evaluate me beyond the names of my previous employers. Whether it is writing on platforms like LinkedIn or building interactive tools on their personal websites, knowledge workers need something similar. AI can make this process fun and creative, and help people experience your expertise without having to meet you.

Wasn’t personal branding supposed to fix this?

Even before anyone was worried about ChatGPT taking their job, we’d been hearing the same advice for years: Build your personal brand. Post on LinkedIn more, put yourself out there—become a thought leader. In theory, a strong personal brand should give you an advantage over someone with the same credentials on their resume but no public presence.

In practice, almost nobody does this well. LinkedIn has more than 1 billion registered users, but only a tiny fraction of those share content. Much of what gets shared is self-congratulatory announcements, not proof of expertise. And more and more of what is shared is obviously AI-written. Readers’ eyes gloss over the drivel as they move to the next rocketship emoji on their timeline.

The people who do want to share real insights—writing-first practitioners, as I’ve been calling them—are fed up with the platform. You can’t format text in posts. The algorithm surfaces two-week-old content like it’s breaking news, and anything older gets buried. That’s why wealth manager Jan Voss moved to a newsletter to share his most important thoughts. He wanted a place where, as he told me earlier this year, “posts have staying power.”

The platform’s functionality is only part of the problem. Thinking more deeply, LinkedIn rewards a specific kind of extroversion. Many people feel uncomfortable with building their brand there because they feel pressure to have a “hot take” or, more simply, to brag.