Ten Worst LinkedIn Profile Mistakes #6: No Skills

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Ten Worst LinkedIn Profile Mistakes #6: No skills

Showcase your top skills and remove low value skills...

“I note that your CEO's top skill is, uh, Microsoft Word...”

Make sure your skills are current, strategically aligned with your current or desired role, and are grouped sensibly.

Recruiters search and specify roles based on skills. And everyone on LinkedIn is going to skim your profile at speed. Are your top three skills really those you want to be known for?

When choosing who to work with, potential customers and connections look for alignment between your skills and what you say you can offer. They also will take notice of the social proof visible from the number of endorsements you have for a particular skill.?

Take a look at the skills listed on your profile. Then take a look at your job title or headline. Is there a natural alignment?between the two?

If not, here are some tips for exactly how you can fix that.

Are you allowing people to actually endorse your skills?

First, check you are allowing people to endorse you for your skills, as shown in the screenshots here.?

Prioritise: Select your top three skills

Secondly, select the top three skills you want to be recognised for. These are not necessarily those you have the most endorsements for.

However, you should ensure they are the most appropriate for your current role, or for the next role you may be seeking. These skills appear on your profile without any need to click to see more skills, so are likely to get the most attention, and the most endorsements.?

if you are looking for a new position, these first three skills should complement your current role's areas of focus, or the areas of focus you want to highlight for a future role.

If you are selling your services, these three skills should relate to your core service areas.

You can prioritise your skills by reordering, and putting your three most important skills to the top of your profile. All of your skills can be dragged and dropped into the optimum order that suits you.

Assign your skills to specific areas of experience

LinkedIn introduced the ability to assign skills to specific experiences or jobs in May 2022.

This allows you to display skills alongside your experience sections, and changes the appearance of the skills section on your profile, to show which roles this skill is related to.

To add a skill for a specific bit of experience, you edit the experience and scroll down until you locate the 'Skills' section. You can then add a recommended 5 of your skills to this experience.

The first ten or so will appear on your profile, depending on the length of the text that constitutes the skill.

As default, skills appear in order of which has the most endorsements.

The other way to do this is to edit your skills, and assign each individual skill to individual experiences.?

You can also assign skills to your Education, Volunteering and Accomplishments sections when you assign skills from the skills section, so for example, you can assign a skill to a publication or project.

Why do skills matter on a LinkedIn Profile?

There are four main reasons that skills are important on your LinkedIn Profile -

1. Search. If you use a Recruiter Premium Account, you can now choose to sort a list of candidates by the skills required for the position. And guess who uses Recruiter Premium Accounts? You got it - Recruiters. So your skills can get you found and hired — but not if they are missing.
2. Alignment. If you see a job title like CFO, or Chief Financial Officer, you'd naturally expect that there were some associated fiscal skills: Business Planning, Budgets, Strategic Planning, Business Development.
3. Credibility. It's simple social proof - if you have dozens of endorsements for your skills, you look more credible than someone with few, or no endorsements.
4. Search (again). Skills are also 'weighted' in standard and advanced LinkedIn searches - and so a lot of endorsements for skills relevant to your position help you to be found. And recruiters just love to search on skills. No skill = not found = no job offer.

And four more very relevant facts

1. Skills for jobs have changed by ~25% since 2015 & by 2027 they are expected to change by ~50%
2. Members have added 286 million skills to their profiles in 2021 (up 22% from 2020)
3. 40% of Hirers on LinkedIn explicitly used skills data to fill open roles in 2021 (up 20% year over year)
4. Hirers on LinkedIn are 60% more likely to find a successful hire than those not relying on skills as a part of the hiring process.

What should I do about my skills?

There are seven key steps to take -

1. Look around you. Check the profiles of people you admire or respect, and see what skills they list. Make a note of the most important or impressive, and copy/paste into a note file the key skills that they have, but which may not be on your profile now. It's as easy as typing in a skill to add it to your profile.
2. Ask your friends and peers. Ask people what skills they'd say you have. You can sometimes be surprised by the results, and find that people recognise you for skills you'd not really considered you had.
3. Prioritise. In terms of how skills are viewed, there's a Top 3 which are visible without a click, and then up to another 47. In my view, 50 skills are too many for the mind to assess.?I can't enumerate 50 skills for anyone that I know. Try aiming for a maximum of 20 or 30. Decide what your Top Three skills are, and list them in order of importance - not just in the order of popularity so far, which is what LinkedIn shows as default.
4. Group. Placing related skills together makes it easy for people to endorse you for the skills they recognise in you. Go for congruence. Put Marketing together with Marketing Strategy and Digital Marketing, and don't leave important skills lost on their own. You simply drag and drop to move them around so similar skills sit alongside each other.
5. Edit your skills. You can add new skills. Remove irrelevant ones. LinkedIn even has an Artificial Intelligence function which, when you go to add new skills, will suggest skills you may have, based on the text in your profile, and the existing skills in place.
6. Ask for endorsements. These offer social proof.?And an easy way to start getting endorsements for your skills is to give them. You can change your notification settings to receive an email when people endorse you, so that you can thank them, and as appropriate, also endorse their skills. Yes, it becomes a bit of a game, but it has an important purpose.
7. Don't sit back. Is it SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation or Search Engine Optimization people are looking for? And as you now work optimising Apps for search, do you call it ASO or App Search Optimisation / Optimization? You need to make a judgement call on things like this. Or add all the variants. Things change, people use different ways of naming things, and new terms and phrases evolve. Anyone remember describing working in 'New Media' or 'Web 2.0' in the early 2000s? No longer relevant - and if that skill is still lurking there on your profile, it makes you look irrelevant and out of touch. Keep it fresh.

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About David Petherick

David is a?LinkedIn Profile Doctor?who makes you visible, legible and credible on LinkedIn. He works across the world from his base in Edinburgh, Scotland. Learn more about his services at the?doc.scot?website.

For a limited period once a week, David offers free ten-minute microsurgery sessions to help you improve your profile.?Why not book an appointment to suit your diary today