LinkedIn Skills & Endorsements

These are my Skills? The Skills feature on LinkedIn has been in beta for sometime but has now been rolled out to all of the LinkedIn Profiles. If you haven’t taken the time (or knew you needed to) to select your Skills for people to Endorse, some Skills may have been pulled from the keywords on your LinkedIn profile. You might want to take a few moments to add the Skills to your Profile that you would like to have…. As well as delete the ones you don’t want on your Profile like Job Scanning. To find Skills & Expertise, go to your Toolbar on your Home page on your LinkedIn Profile Click on More.

Skills & Expertise The Skills & Expertise section is meant to allow you to search and connect with other professionals with similar Skills & Expertise. You will need to type in a specific skill set in the Search box. The term “skill” is a loosely applied term as it can range from a skill, an industry, topic, or area of expertise. A list of similar or exact Skills will pop up. You can add up to 50 Skills to your Profile.

Searching for Skills & Expertise to Put on Your Profile On the Skills & Expertise page you will see the Skill that you selected, its definition and the assigned Relative Growth to that Skill based on the LinkedIn community. The definition of the Skill is as described by LinkedIn. You will see if this Skill is on your Profile, Related Skills, Other Professionals and Related Companies that have the Skills on their Profile. You have to either add the Skill to Your Profile or See Suggested Skills to go to the Find or Edit screen to delete Skills.

Find and Edit Skills You will want to make sure that your list of Skills is pertinent to your profession and career as your connections will be asked to endorsed you on a random selection of your Skills. Unfortunately many are randomly clicking Endorse on their connections’ Skills. Thus you may be “blindly” endorsed for a Skill that is very far from your core Skill set such as cooking or telecommunications. Click on Find and Edit . Now you can delete any Skill that you don’t want on your Profile. There will be a list of Suggested skills & expertise for your profile which is a start. It is recommended to go back to the home page of Skills & Expertise to search for other key Skills for your profile.

Endorsements Ranking Once you start receiving Endorsements, they will be listed on your Profile in order of the number of Endorsements you receive. You can see who Endorsed you for a Skill. If you don’t want that Endorsement to show up on your Profile, you can Hide By clicking the number in the left or the arrow on the right you can pull up the entire list of connections who have endorsed you. Someone can endorse you for a skill that you don’t have but you have to approve it before it shows up on your profile according to LinkedIn. You can chose to add the skill or not. You can Hide an endorsement from someone but once you Hide this endorsement you cannot unhide it. And once you Endorse someone for a Skill, they will get notified of this through email. Tip: Don’t stalk with Endorsements.

Where is this all going?

Recommendations Endorsements don’t replace Recommendations . According to LinkedIn, “A recommendation is a comment written by a LinkedIn member to endorse a colleague, business partner, student, or service provider. People interested in hiring or doing business with someone often consider recommendations in making their decisions.” Recommendations are still the best way to show that there is someone in your network who has provided exemplary service, or is an expert in their field.

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for 2013

From ClearedJobs.Net