The Most Important Skills To List On LinkedIn (With Examples)

In today’s day and age, being “findable” is an important part of the job recruitment process. Whether a recruiter is searching for candidates on LinkedIn or someone you met at a job fair looks you up later, you’ll want to make sure your LinkedIn profile is complete with a list of your professional skills.

In this article, we’ll discuss what makes the skills section so important, how to edit it, and exactly which skills you should include to attract recruiters.

Key Takeaways

• Some of the top skills you should consider adding to your LinkedIn profile include business, IT, management, marketing, analytical, and communication skills.

• Including skills on your LinkedIn profile can increase your chances of being found and contacted by a recruiter.

• You should update your LinkedIn skills section regularly.

Top Skills to Add to Your LinkedIn Profile

When choosing which skills to display, it’s important to strike a balance between important general skills and job-specific domain skills.

We’ve compiled a list of skills that employers most commonly look for in candidates, categorized by industry:

1. Business. Business skills are extremely important to display if you’re pursuing any type of management or administration role.

   Your business expertise will directly decide how effectively you can make decisions and create value for your company.

   Make sure to list business skills such as:

   • Business development

   • Business intelligence (BI)

   • Economics

   • Business analysis

   • Administration

   • Business management

2. Information Technology (IT). IT skills refer not only to skills used by software developers but to any skills used by professionals who design and manage computer-based technologies.

   According to LinkedIn, these are the IT skills that are statistically most likely to get you hired:

   • Cloud computing

   • Data presentation

   • Content management

   • Tech support

   • UI/UX

   • Software engineering

   • Mobile development

   • Middleware and integration software

   • Blockchain

   • Scientific computing

3. Management. Demonstrating leadership skills will make you an attractive candidate no matter which industry you’re applying to.

   Here are some critical management skills:

   • Project management

   • Strategic planning

   • Delegating tasks

   • Coaching

   • Negotiation

   • Relationship management

4. Marketing. The marketing industry encompasses a wide variety of jobs such as market research, public relations, and advertising.

   Here are some of the marketing skills that tend to attract the most recruiters on LinkedIn:

   • SEO/SEM

   • Content marketing

   • Online marketing

   • Market research

   • Social media

   • Media planning

   • Channel marketing

   • Affiliate marketing

5. Analytical. No matter the industry, employers prefer workers who can analyze information and think critically about problems.

   Important analytical skills include:

   • Data analysis

   • Critical thinking

   • Problem-solving

   • Research

   • Consulting

6. Communication. Effective communication is perhaps the most important soft skill for professionals working almost any job. Even if you have great ideas and plans, they’re useless unless you’re able to share them effectively through speech and written form.

   Critical communication skills to possess include:

   • Active listening

   • Writing

   • Nonverbal communication

   • Presentation

   • Newsletters

   • Editing

7. Other important LinkedIn skills. LinkedIn has revealed numerous other soft and hard skills that statistically improve your chances of receiving messages from recruiters and finding a job.

   Here are some of those top skills:

   • Creativity

   • People management

   • Time management

   • Persuasion

   • Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

   • Translation

   • Video production

   • Corporate communications

   • Industrial design

   • Collaboration

   • Adaptability

   • Analytical reasoning

   • Sales leadership

   • Journalism

   • Competitive strategies

   • AI (Artificial Intelligence)

   • Web analytics

Additional Tips for Listing Skills On LinkedIn

Here are some important things to keep in mind as you decide which skills to list on your LinkedIn profile:

• Hit the skill cap. LinkedIn allows you to list up to 50 skills on your profile. Many argue that you shouldn’t list too many skills, as they’ll distract from your most important skills when recruiters read your profile.

  Adding too many skills also makes it difficult for your connections to choose which ones to endorse, resulting in fewer endorsements and decreased discoverability.

  However, studies show that candidates who use all 50 of their skill slots still have a better chance of getting hired. This is likely due to the SEO benefit and increases in searchability outweighing any of the negatives.

  Just be sure to list actual skills that are relevant to the industry you work in, rather than filler buzzwords.

• Rank your skills. It’s an obvious tip, but you should make sure to arrange your skills so that the most important ones appear at the top, increasing the chances that recruiters read them.

  Do so by navigating to your skills section, hitting the edit button, and then clicking and dragging skills to move them around.

• Focus your skills using your “Experience” section. Another way to minimize the downsides of listing the maximum of 50 skills on your LinkedIn profile is to focus on the important ones in your experience section.

  Pick the most key skills and contextualize them by providing examples of how you’ve used them at past jobs.

  Make sure to highlight them with career achievements that focus on the results and actual value that you created for employers.

• List both hard and soft skills. Your list of skills likely includes both technical skills that make you proficient at what you do and behavioral skills that make you an excellent employee or leader. Both are valuable, so you should list both sets on your LinkedIn profile.

  You can also highlight your soft or hard skills depending on the job you’re interested in.

  If you’re a manager looking for another management role, list your soft interpersonal, leadership, and communication skills first. If you’re a technically trained professional such as a web developer, you might want to list your top applicable hard skills first and then your soft skills.

Why It’s Important to List Key Skills on LinkedIn

The Featured Skills Endorsements section is one of the most important parts of any effective LinkedIn profile.

Here are the reasons why you should spend some time to polish your LinkedIn skills section, even if you already have a similar section on your resume:

• First impressions matter. Before examining the meat of your LinkedIn profile, most recruiters will begin by skimming your skills section. If you fail to catch their attention or make a good impression, many will simply move on to the hundreds or thousands of other relevant profiles available.

  Therefore, if you don’t polish up your skills section, the rest of your LinkedIn profile may be completely irrelevant.

• Searchability. The keywords that you include on your profile influence how Google ranks you when recruiters search for candidates.

• The numbers don’t lie. According to LinkedIn’s own statistics, “members with 5 or more skills listed are contacted up to 33 times more by recruiters and receive up to 17 times more profile views.”

  Surveys also show that 69% of employed professionals believe that their skills were more important factors than their education when they were looking for a job.

How to Manage Skills on Your LinkedIn Profile

The easiest way to add skills to your LinkedIn profile is to click on your profile, scroll down to the “Featured Skills Endorsements” section, and then click “Add a new skill.”

From your profile, you can also click on “Add New Profile Section” under your headline and then choose the “Skills” tab.

Once you add skills to your profile, you can then manage them by clicking on the pencil icon of your “Featured Skills Endorsements” section.

By clicking and dragging your skills, you can rearrange them in whichever order you please. Ideally, you should put the most important skills at the very top.

Clicking the “X” button will also allow you to delete skills.

It’s important to keep your skills up to date by editing them regularly. Pay attention to what skills your LinkedIn connections endorse you for and whether they match your current area of expertise.

Another useful tool is LinkedIn’s skill assessments, which allow you to validate your skills with actual tests and then display those results on your profile.

How to Endorse Skills on LinkedIn

Endorsements are a feature on LinkedIn that allows you and your connections to endorse each other for certain skills. Being endorsed in a skill shows recruiters that others have observed your proficiency in that area, which increases your credibility.

To endorse someone else’s skills, first, click on their profile and navigate to the “Skills Endorsements” section.

Next, locate the skill you wish to endorse and click the plus sign. A form will pop up that asks you to rate the person’s proficiency in the skill, as well as explain how you’ve been able to observe them in action.

Research shows that the best way to obtain an endorsement yourself is to endorse someone else. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should simply add people you don’t know and spam skill endorsements.

If you’ve genuinely observed a contact excel in an area, make sure to find their LinkedIn profile and do them a favor. They’ll likely return it.

How to Verify Skills on Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn allows you to verify the skills that you’ve listed on your profile by taking skill assessments designed to test your proficiency.

Doing so is typically worth it, especially for skills that are critical for the type of job that you’re looking for.

LinkedIn has published statistics that show that candidates who complete skill assessments are nearly 30% more likely to get hired.

To take a skill assessment, simply follow this process:

1. Scroll to the “Skills Endorsements” section of your profile.

2. Locate the skill you wish to verify, and click on any available skill assessments.

3. Score over 70% on the assessment to earn a “verified skill” badge on your profile next to the skill.

4. Optionally, you can choose to control the visibility of the skill badge if you don’t want to display it for any reason.

Before you take a skill assessment, it may be wise to first brush up on your skills with LinkedIn’s learning courses.

These are sometimes displayed as your browse LinkedIn, but you can also access them by searching “LinkedIn Learning” and exploring all the available options.

LinkedIn Skills FAQs

1. Are LinkedIn skills important?

   Yes, LinkedIn skills are important. The skills you list on your LinkedIn profile act as keywords, which means your profile will come up when recruiters search for the skills you have. Your having the right skills listed will give you a better chance of being found by a recruiter and will help them decide if they want to contact you.

2. Do employers care about LinkedIn skills?

   Yes, employers do care about LinkedIn skills. This is especially true if they’re searching for candidates on LinkedIn. Recruiters will often use these profiles as a reference point for whether or not they want to reach out to a candidate to have them apply for a role.

3. Can recruiters see my skills on LinkedIn?

   Yes, recruiters can see your skills on LinkedIn. This is a good thing because it gives them a better overview of what you bring to the table and may make you a more attractive candidate.

Author

Chris Kolmar

Chris Kolmar is a co-founder of Zippia and the editor-in-chief of the Zippia career advice blog. He has hired over 50 people in his career, been hired five times, and wants to help you land your next job. His research has been featured on the New York Times, Thrillist, VOX, The Atlantic, and a host of local news. More recently, he's been quoted on USA Today, BusinessInsider, and CNBC.

Expert

Matt Warzel, CPRW, CIR

Matt Warzel a President of a resume writing firm (MJW Careers, LLC) with 15+ years of recruitment, outplacement, career coaching and resume writing experience. Matt is also a Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) and Certified Internet Recruiter (CIR) with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (Marketing Focus) from John Carroll University.