3 Skills in Full View on LinkedIn; Are You Happy With Yours?

LinkedIn skills and endorsement, love ’em or hate ’em; you still need them! They are one of my fav topics to talk about, I’ve even got a post called: “I need to talk to you about LinkedIn Endorsements, trust me!“. All the reasoning in that article still holds true today. Only now we get to see less and need to use them more cleverly.

LinkedIn underwent a major overhaul early 2017, this affected how your skills displays big time! You can add 50 skills to your profile, yet only THREE are in full view! We used to see 10 skills with up to 12 endorsement for each of those skills.

Less is More With Endorsements

Displaying 3 skills instead of 10 and just 2 endorsements instead of 12 is definitely less. At the same time, the way LinkedIn Skills and Endorsements are displayed now is considered more. Instead of just 12 pretty faces the two displayed are carefully chosen by LinkedIn.
We trust people over ads and people we know even more so! As you can see in the image to the left, which I took from Stephanie Ward’s Profile, the two endorsements for each skill have something in common. The first one shows a peer professional and mentions how many professionals with the same skill endorsed Stephanie. The second endorsement comes from someone in my own network and tells me how many people from my network endorsed this skill.

Choose Your Top 3 Carefully

That is right - CHOOSE, don’t meekly accept the choices LinkedIn makes on your behalf. Obviously you will choose 3 skills that people who consider hiring you are looking for. You probably have more than 3 desirable skills. In that case it is tempting to go for the 3 skills that have the most endorsements. If there is a particular skill you’d like more endorsements on, you might be brave and stick that one on the top. Probably as #2 nicely cushioned with two highly endorsed skills.

How To Reorder Your Skills

Click your pretty little face top right
Scroll down to ‘featured skills & endorsements
Click the pencil’ next to ‘add a new skill’
Drag the little lines to the right to move a skill
Click save

One final thought: you can add 50 skills. Make the most of this. Recruiters search for specific skills, this is the only place in your LinkedIn Profile where you can list keywords without cleverly wording your sentences.

This post was originally published on petrafisher.com

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Petra Fisher

Petra Fisher is a LinkedIn consultant who doesn’t quite fit in the box (don’t worry, she is losing weight). Straight forward, no-nonsense feedback, fun, creative and driven to keep going till the result is what she set out to achieve with you. To learn more about Petra, check out her site petrafisher.com or visit Petra on LinkedIn.

Petra lives with her teenage daughter and big-fat-red-cat. She loves to travel to Thailand, and to offset her nerdyness (books and computers are never far) she takes long walks and gets stuck into some crochet.