The platform allows you to sign in with any email address associated with your account. LinkedIn suggests first trying to sign in with a secondary email address that’s associated with your account. Here’s how to reclaim your LinkedIn account when you have no access to the email you used to sign up for the account. The only downside to this is that any notifications and emails from LinkedIn will go to their personal email rather than their work email. Note that you can log into LinkedIn with a different email that you display in your contact information section, so that’s why I always recommend that users sign up with and use their personal email instead of their work email.

I recommend that you sign up for your account with your personal email because that email will be with you no matter where you land professionally and the odds of you staying at the same position for the entirety of your career today are very slim. One way to avoid this in the future is to always add an alternate email to your LinkedIn account. When you’re in transition, you want people to find you and you want to be able to contact potential employers through LinkedIn ASAP. Your LinkedIn InMail messages and notifications will go to your old email as well (of course they are safe in your LinkedIn interface – which doesn’t help you because you can’t access it). It is important to note that not only will you not be able to immediately access your account without access to your email (because it’s your log-in) but none of your connections can contact you by email if you don’t update it – they’ll be emailing you at another address to which you don’t have access. You lose or change your job suddenly, your company changes its email and you forget to change your email, you’re in transition and you forget to update your email on your LinkedIn account. There are many instances when you no longer use or have access to the email address used to register your LinkedIn account. While this is a frustrating situation, it is not hopeless. I work with a lot of professionals who can no longer get access to their LinkedIn account because they signed up for the account under a prior email to which they no longer have access and so the password retrieval email goes to their old email which doesn’t help them one bit.

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