LinkedIn Featured Skills and Endorsements

Did you know that you’re allowed to display 50 skills on your LinkedIn profile and feature 3 top skills? Those 50 skills should be job related, industry and management skills.

LinkedIn currently breaks down your skills as ‘Industry Knowledge’, ‘Tools & Technologies’, ‘Interpersonal’ and ‘Other’ – it’s really important to note that your skills are essentially your keywords and demonstrate your competency.  Ask yourself, have you optimised this section with the 50 skills that you currently want to be known for?

Having the featured skills and endorsement section populated serves two important purposes:

1. Your skills should reflect the topics and expertise that potential clients are looking for.
2. If you’ve done a good job of optimising skills and getting endorsements, this section will help reaffirm what you’re talking about in your previous summary section.

There are generally 2 types of people who will endorse you:

1. Firstly, those who know you as a professional and who’ve have first-hand experience of your skills. They will endorse you because they know you.
2. And secondly, connections who’ve not worked directly with you – these people usually endorse you for your 3 featured skills when there’s a clear alignment with your headline and overall profile.

The top 3 skills that you feature should clearly correlate to your LinkedIn profile headline at all times.

It’s good practice to regularly review your endorsements as if you’re no longer using a certain skill in your current role, you may want to delete it.

In order to get endorsements, I’d strongly advise that you optimise this section with the most relevant keywords specific to your role and industry. This way you make it easier for your connections to endorse you for relevant skills.  The quickest and easiest way to get endorsements is to ask your current employer and colleagues.

Another way is to give endorsements to others, and promptly respond to any thank you messages that you get as a result.  Each time you endorse someone, they get a notification that tells them this, and this might prompt them to do the same for you.

By giving endorsements to your connections you’re paying it forward and also showing up in a very unobtrusive yet valuable way.You’re raising your own profile and adding value to your connections at the same time. It’s a nice way to give back to your network so you may want to incorporate this into your LinkedIn connection strategy.

Which do you rate more – LinkedIn endorsements or recommendations?  

Bio:

Hi, my name is Jennifer Corcoran.  I’m known as the Super Connector and I help coaches, consultants and trainers to super boost their LinkedIn profiles and and attract clients using my 4-stage PACT Framework.

Without my help they will continue to be stuck, confused, daunted or overwhelmed by LinkedIn. Through me, they can create a LinkedIn profile which truly represents them and a holistic approach to networking on LinkedIn.

They will be left feeling reinvigorated, confident and raring to go and excited to tap into all the opportunities this amazing platform offers them.