Choosing Your Linkedin Skills Carefully

Developing your LinkedIn profile forces you to make decisions about your career. It forces you to decide what you offer employers and/or clients in terms of your expertise and skills. You can’t list everything down so you need to think about choosing your LinkedIn skills carefully . You can’t afford to be vague with this task. You need to be decisive and creative when completing this task.

But what skills do you choose? Which ones do you promote? How do you create a personal profile that showcases your many talents and puts you at the top of LinkedIn searches?

Being at the top of searches holds a lot of career benefits – almost too many to list here. The main benefit is that you are seen and recognised as being an expert in your chosen career.

The LinkedIn search facility is like the Google search for individuals. Consider how many times you visit websites on page 3 or 4 of Google. You tend to pick three or four sites to visit which are listed on the first page of Google. Whether Google is right or wrong in its selection of sites, a number one ranking says, “Google, the largest site in the world, believes this website is the best one to visit”. LinkedIn now says the same about individuals.

So let’s do the same research on yourself now but instead of using Google let’s use LinkedIn. Go to your edit profile section of LinkedIn and go down to the Skills and Endorsements section.

Now choose the skill that you would most like to be recognised for. Think of just one skill at this stage. You can keep it fairly generic such as “writer”, “accountant”, “programmer”. As soon as you begin to add a skill to the search facility, a number of options will appear in the search box. Make a note of the relevant ones to you before you hit the search button.

Now, pop over to Google trends.  You can find this by typing ‘Google trends’ into Google.  For each of your chosen skills look at the relative growth graph which suggests whether your particular skill is in demand or falling. This information is why LinkedIn and Google are so valuable to your career development.  You can now assess your skills on a global basis. You can see first hand whether your skills are growing in demand.  Think about the growth in skills such as big data analytics.

So the simple question is how do you get your name to the top of the Professionals list on Linkedin?

If you want to gain this top ranking, you can join our 30-day LinkedIn career programme.  You will discover everything that you need to know about LinkedIn in terms of making connections, writing informative posts and blogs and engaging with your network in order to create career opportunities for you.  The 30-day LinkedIn programme is £299 including VAT and promises to boost your LinkedIn profile even further up the LinkedIn search engines.