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LinkedIn Skills and Endorsements

Posted by Kathleen Smith

Do you need to make some sense of LinkedIn Skills and Endorsements?

Recently LinkedIn made several changes to profiles and profile features. Every job search should use multiple resources such as LinkedIn, networking, and job boards like ClearedJobs.Net, to research and leverage opportunities. And if you still don’t have a LinkedIn profile, you need to strongly consider creating one.

The “new” Skills & Expertise feature has been around for several years in beta. “Skills & Expertise” is a broad term as it can be an industry, topic, skill or even a branch of military service.

If you have not taken the time to update or edit your Skills & Expertise on your LinkedIn profile, do so. You may have noticed that you have been endorsed for Skills that you did not select. LinkedIn automatically pulls skills based on the information in your profile and shares them with your connections for endorsing.

That’s a sly way of getting everyone to participate in Endorsements, even if they didn’t intend to.

Once your connections start endorsing you for Skills, these Skills will be ranked on your Profile. You do have the option of hiding endorsements, and your connections will not know that you have done so.

Some recruiting blogs are predicting that soon Skills will be searchable and could impact a job search. For detailed information on how to edit Skills and Endorsements on your profile:

While you’re at it, when is the last time you updated your keywords and skills on your ClearedJobs.Net Career Preferences?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12, 2012 6:13 pm

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