Upskilling: Making your Linked In skills work for you

Upskilling: Making your Linked In skills work for you

When creating or updating your profile it’s easy to overlook the skills section.

Yet having an accurate representation of your skillset makes your profile far more attractive whether you’re looking for a job or seeking to attract clients to work with you.

Here we look at how to present your skills to make your profile stand out from the crowd and get people to take a closer look!

Why are your skills so important?

Your profile is the shop window of your talents, that’s why, and the more skills you possess, the more attractive you will appear as a potential employee or collaborator.

Plus, of course, LI uses skills to rank profiles in their search algorithm!

You have probably searched on the platform before, have you ever wondered what gets a person to the top of the list?

The algorithm looks at your search parameters and matches them with the profiles that most closely align with your search.

The more skills you have, the more likely it is you will achieve a high ranking and thus increase your chance of standing out from the crowd!

Bringing recruiters to your yard

Recruiters often use LinkedIn Recruiter to help them search for people with specific skills and experience.

By having your skills section as thorough, relevant and up to date as possible you are maximising your prospects of getting near the top of the rankings and attracting their notice!

So it really matters a lot!

Creating your skills strategy

Remember, you want to stand out from the crowd, so don’t take the lazy option!

This means you shouldn’t just look up the most poplar skills and copy and paste them into your own profile!

You need to be choosing skills that are relevant to your current role or any vacancy in future that may be of interest.

Time then, for a little research….

Have a look at relevant job descriptions that best align with the type of work you do or the roles you are looking for.

Treat them just as if you were applying for the role and copy the job description onto a separate document.

The more the merrier, if you can locate about 20 relevant positions you should be well covered skills-wise!

Let the software take the strain

There’s a very useful piece of free software that enables you to access the top skills from all the information you have gathered and saved.

He tool is ResyMatch.io and it’s simplicity itself to use!

Simply go to ResyMatch and click on the ‘Job Description Scanner option.

Copy all your text into the job description scanner field.

All you then need to do is hit ‘scan’ and let the software get to work!

It will pull out all the hard and soft skills in the job descriptions and rank them in order of frequency.

They will be the most relevant skills for either your current role or the type of work you are looking for.

Adding skills to your profile

This again is something that is very simply done.

Navigate to your profile and scroll down to the ‘Skills and Endorsements’ section.

Click ‘Add new skill’.

Enter your skill(s) and click the ‘add’ button.

The new skills are now added to your profile!

The more skills you can identify and add the better, you can have up to 50 of them!

Remember, the more skills you have, the more searches you’ll appear in, so it makes sense to include as many relevant ones as possible.

Boosting ranking through endorsements

It’s worth bearing in mind that the LI algorithm only factors skills into their search criteria that have received at least one endorsement.

 It ranks you in a search according to how many endorsements you have received for the relevant skill.

It’s therefore in your interests to gather as many endorsements for your skills as you possibly can, so don’t be afraid to ask people to help you by endorsing your skills on your profile.

Existing employers or clients are the best people to ask, but anyone who is in a position to judge your ability and comment on it is fine, just as long as they aren’t all your relatives!

Rather than dilute the impact of your endorsements, make sure you focus on your top three skills, because LI only shows your top 3 skills by default.

And remember to update

Profiles in general require regular updating to prevent them from appearing stale and your skills section is no different.

When you have acquired new skills, don’t forget to add them, or remove those that are no longer relevant.

Best to do it at least twice a year, at least on an ‘as and when’ basis so your profile is always bang up to date!

Now, enjoy the rewards of boosting your skills!

Now you know the vital role your skills play in getting you at the top of search rankings, make sure you update them so you can really reap the rewards that your abilities deserve!

If you don’t have the time to do his yourself, you can always outsource to a SM marketing agency which can help as part of a comprehensive account management strategy.

Contact us if this is of interest!

But just a few minutes worth of effort honing your skills will make for a far more effective Linked In experience, whether it’s a new role or new clients you are seeking!