Including skills on your LinkedIn profile and getting them endorsed by someone with high-rated profile gives you a leverage over other similar profiles and provides a good way of showcasing your abilities. But one of the biggest challenge here is getting these endorsements from a reputable source. In this post, I will explain the importance of these endorsements and will guide you about getting your skills endorsed.
Overview of LinkedIn skill and endorsements
LinkedIn introduced the feature of skills endorsements back in 2012, around 10 years after the platform was founded. As of July 2017, an estimated 1+ billion endorsements were given by people to each other since its launch.
Adding skills to your LinkedIn profile is a good way to give an overview of your skills and abilities to anyone who might be interested in knowing about them (like a prospective employer). They give a concise and brief overview of what you can do within the professional domain.
When someone endorses your skill, it strengthens your profile and there are good chances of your profile get discovered by employers looking to hire people that possess that specific skill.
LinkedIn allows its users to add up to 50 skills in their profile. If you think about it, it might seem like a whole lot of skills but it gives you a good chance to expand your horizons by adding more sub-skills within a skill set. For instance, if you are good at writing and want to include it as a skill on LinkedIn, instead of including ‘writing’ as a skill, a better option is to include skills like Content writing, article writing, academic writing etc.
Top skills to include in your LinkedIn profile
As discussed in the previous section, LinkedIn skills are of great importance in building your positive professional repute. Now, some skills are specific to some particular field (like having programming-related skill will be processed by someone in the field of information technology) but there are some skills that are common to all professional paradigms.
A common skill which a professional should have no matter whatever field of profession he/she is from is good communication. Since almost all companies place employees in teams to work, having good communication ability is important. This skill allows you to deliver your thoughts to other conveniently and to easily understand what the other person is trying to say.
Management skills are also needed in not only within the professional environment but also in your daily life. In the professional environment, however, these skills are crucial as they affect your performance as an employee. This includes managing time, resources and tasks etc.
Other general skills that might be expected of you as a professional are analytical skills, the ability of problem-solving, basic understanding of IT and computers (since it’s the age of technology), critical thinking etc.
These skills might seem like trivial to you, but they give a good impression of your overall profile. So, the better option is that you should include these in your skill set.
Do endorsements really matter?
Well, the biggest purpose of having a LinkedIn profile is definitely to showcase yourself as a professional and being viewed by other professionals within your career domain. And if you want to get yourself explored by other professionals and prospective clients, skill endorsements do matter.
According to LinkedIn, if have more than 5 skills included in your list, there is a higher chance of you getting discovered by others. And, if these skills have been endorsed, there’s even a much higher chance. Having endorsed skills give you a better rank over people with similar skills but non-endorsed.
Consider a situation in which you have applied for some job and provided them with your LinkedIn profile but your skills have not been endorsed, whereas your competitor who has also applied for the same position has a large number of endorsements for their skills. In this scenario, there might be a good chance that the recruiters would prefer the other participant.
Endorsements are a kind of a surety that you actually have the listed skills but they are most effective in two cases: either you have a huge number of endorsements for your skill or you have had your skill endorsed by a reputable person. That is least effective if you have a very low number of endorsements on your skills and that too from a low-rated profile.
Conclusively, endorsements do matter as for your overall rating of profile and for your chances of getting discovered by other professionals in your field.
How to get endorsements for you skills?
There are a number of ways through which you can increase endorsements on your skills. We’ll discuss three of those methods in this section that will help you to get more endorsements on your profile.
One way is to ask people specifically to endorse your skill on your profile. This might seem like an odd way of getting endorsements but believe me, with a polite message of offering them endorsing their skills too, will do the work. However, it’s better to ask people who actually know about your skills to endorse them.
Another way is to go on LinkedIn endorsing other’s skills (but without asking them to do so for you). There is a good chance that some people, if not all, will endorse back to you too.
The last method we’ll discuss involves moving the endorsements section at the top of your profile. This way, it will be more visible which will compel more people to actually endorse your skills.
I hope this text would have provided you with a clear concept of what LinkedIn skills and endorsements are, what is their importance, how can they affect your LinkedIn profile and how can you get endorsements. I’ve done my part to explain you the topic and now it’s your turn to provide me with the feedback about how much useful you found the post. Leave your feedback in the comments section below.