Day #4: Tailoring Your Top 3 Skills for Impactful Presence

Welcome to Day #4 of my free, 5-day Love Your LinkedIn Challenge! The final day of the lesson postings is tomorrow, June 18, but you have until June 19, 2024, to complete all the assignments. Participating in the challenge allows you to practice essential engagement skills — and you could be my challenge WINNER and receive my #1 Best-Selling book, LinkedIn for the Savvy Executive. I aim to uplift you and your engagement on this essential business platform.

Your top 3 skills are a powerful way to communicate who you are and what you do, making it easier for people to be interested in connecting. Highlighting these skills effectively can significantly enhance your LinkedIn presence and help you stand out.

If you are like most people, you’ve probably not looked at your LinkedIn Skills section in quite a long time. But before looking at your Skills Inventory toward the end of your LinkedIn profile, I want you to pause and think about the three things you’d like to be known for in your professional role. By “three things,” I mean keywords that people might enter into the search engine to find a professional like you. For example, an HR executive might want to be known for culture change, talent management, and organizational effectiveness.

Okay. Do you have your “three things” in mind? Write them down. When you've done that, you’re ready to act on today’s assignment.

Aligning your top three skills for maximum brand impact:

Now, look at your Skills section. What are the three skills at the top of your list? Do they match your list of what you’d like to be known for?

For most LinkedIn users, the answer would be no. That’s a problem because people can only see the top two or three skills on your profile without clicking to see more, so with your top-listed skills, you are signaling what you want people to remember about you.

Also, LinkedIn has put more emphasis on one’s top three skills in the last 18 months or so, so it’s a good bet that skills in one’s top three spots are now prioritized in LinkedIn’s algorithm. The number of endorsements you’ve received for each skill no longer determines the order of your skills' appearance. You’re in charge now.

Challenge assignment for Day #4:

The assignment is to have the top three skills on your list reflect the three things you want to be known for as a professional. To complete the assignment, tell us in the comment section below what you did and what three skills are now at the top of your listing.

If the top three things you want to be known for are reflected elsewhere in your skills listing, move those three skills to the top three positions. (To move skills, navigate to the top of the Skills sections, where you’ll see the 3-dot [ellipsis] icon and a plus sign. Click the ellipsis to reveal the screen that allows you to reorder your skills.)

If none of the skills on your list relate to the top three things you want to be known for, add them. You can list 50 skills. If you need to add skills and already have 50 listed, delete at least three less important-to-you skills to add three new ones. (Click on the plus sign icon at the top of the Skills section to add skills. Use skills in LinkedIn’s list. Start with a likely skill name in the skills search box and choose from the options. You may need to search using several options before you find one that conveys what you intend.)

Reorder your skills so your new top three skills are in the top three positions. Newly added skills will not be endorsed yet. That is less egregious than it may seem to you. It is more important that these three skills are central to who you are as a professional than that they are endorsed.

Why is this assignment important?

I have long contended that the most memorable LinkedIn profiles articulate the three things we want to be known for. Building your profile to emphasize these three things is effective because we instinctively remember things in groups of three. If we specifically select our top skills so that one skill is associated with each of the three things we want to be known for, we reinforce how we want people to perceive us.

If you’d like to go beyond this assignment to maximize the effectiveness of your entire skills listing, I recommend my article Have You Missed The Step That Gives Your LinkedIn Skills Power? While the skills interface has changed since this article was written, the principles for improving your skills listing remain the same.

I love action-takers! In addition to sharing your assignment, I'd love to hear about your experience with this Love Your LinkedIn Challenge!