Having a strong LinkedIn profile is crucial for job seekers and professionals looking to advance their careers. Your LinkedIn profile serves as an online resume and portfolio, allowing you to showcase your skills, experience, and accomplishments to connect with employers and expand your professional network.
When building your LinkedIn profile, it’s important to highlight the top skills that make you most qualified for the types of jobs you are targeting. But with limited space, you need to be selective and strategic about which skills to include.
How to Determine Your Top Skills for LinkedIn
Here are some tips on choosing your top 5 skills to showcase on your LinkedIn profile:
- Review job postings of roles you want and highlight keywords that continually pop up under required or desired skills, qualifications, and experience.
- Think about common themes and skill sets that unite your work history and biggest accomplishments.
- Consider both hard skills (technical abilities specific to a job) and soft skills (transferable abilities like communication and teamwork).
- Ask people who have worked with you about the skills that set you apart from others.
- Focus on skills that align with your future career goals and the direction you want your career path to take.
Top 5 Skills to Include on LinkedIn
Keeping the above guidance in mind, here are 5 of the top skills most relevant for a strong LinkedIn profile:
1. Communication
Communication skills are sought after in every industry, for every job role. Strong written and verbal communication abilities allow you to articulate your ideas, message, and value clearly to employers, colleagues, and clients.
Ways to demonstrate communication skills on LinkedIn include:
- Writing an engaging, error-free LinkedIn profile summary.
- Sharing written content as posts that showcase your ability to explain complex topics to others.
- Highlighting presentations, public speaking experiences, and examples of successfully conveying ideas to leadership or stakeholders.
- Recommendations that praise your concise, effective communication abilities.
2. Leadership
Leadership skills involve being able to set direction, motivate, oversee, and work cooperatively with others to accomplish objectives and influence outcomes. Leadership looks different depending on your industry and job title, but general abilities like delegation strategy, team building, and conflict resolution are widely valued.
Display your leadership skills by:
- Listing management positions where you oversaw teams, departments, or organizations.
- Gaining endorsements for skills like coaching, mentoring, and employee development.
- Telling stories of projects you led and team goals you helped accomplish.
- Highlighting decreases in turnover, increases in productivity, or other outcomes you drove.
3. Project Management
Project management involves spearheading projects using methodologies and tools to organize teams, resources, and timelines to accomplish defined goals. As projects become more central to how organizations operate, project management skills are essential for keeping initiatives on time and budget.
Tactics to convey your project management skills are:
- Earning project management certifications like PMP, PRINCE2, or Scrum Master.
- Describing processes, tools, and strategies used to manage key projects successfully.
- Using project management terminology to detail your methodology like work breakdown structures, risk assessments, change control, quality assurance, etc.
- Displaying metrics and data showing projects delivered to scope, schedule, and budget.
4. Strategic Planning
The ability to create long-term, big-picture plans to guide an organization’s mission, direction, competitive positioning, and resource allocation is valued across industries. Strategic thinking allows you to spot trends, opportunities, and challenges that impact broader goals and objectives.
Strategic planning skills to highlight include:
- Experience identifying, evaluating, and forecasting external market conditions, competition, and customer needs.
- Developing organizational goals, policies, initiatives, or operating models.
- Conducting assessments to inform strategies, such as SWOT analysis, market research, or risk analysis.
- Implementing and monitoring strategic plans across departments, markets, or geographic regions.
5. Data Analysis
Data analysis involves collecting, inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data to discover useful information and draw conclusions that drive informed decision making. These skills allow you to interpret quantitative and qualitative data to unlock actionable insights.
Examples of featuring data analysis skills are:
- Highlighting statistical models, data visualization tools, programming languages, or analytics methodologies used.
- Sharing specific metrics and KPIs analyzed to influence decisions and business outcomes.
- Displaying projects where data-driven recommendations were made based on analysis.
- Tying data analytics to software like Excel, Tableau, Python, R, or SQL.
How to Showcase Your Skills on LinkedIn
Once you’ve selected the top skills for your target job or industry, there are a number of ways to feature them throughout your LinkedIn profile:
LinkedIn Profile Summary
Your profile summary is a short introductory section where you can concisely summarize your skills and experiences. This section appears at the top of your profile and is also visible in the About section on mobile. Use bullet points to highlight your top skills here.
Skills & Endorsements
The Skills & Endorsements section allows you to list up to 50 skills. This section is highly visible and allows connections to endorse you for skills they can vouch for.
Work Experience Descriptions
When detailing your work history, incorporate keywords and relevant context about using your top skills in past roles. Focus on skills you want to continue building in your next position.
Projects
The Projects section lets you describe specific initiatives or accomplishments that showcase key skills in action. Share details on your role, process, tools used, and impact delivered.
Courses
Adding certifications, trainings, online classes, and other coursework to your profile is a way to reinforce skills learned.
Examples
Here are two examples of how you can showcase your top skills in your LinkedIn profile summary and work experience sections.
Example 1: Marketing Manager
LinkedIn Profile Summary:
- Innovative marketing manager with 5+ years experience delivering engaging multi-channel campaigns that elevate brand awareness and drive business results. Skilled in social media marketing, digital strategy, content creation, CRM platforms, and campaign performance analysis. Passionate storyteller and communicator able to connect with diverse audiences and clearly convey brand narratives across different formats and styles.
Work Experience:
- Created and executed social media strategy to align with marketing initiatives and broader business goals, resulting in 30% increase in qualified leads. Built relevant, engaging social content and oversaw community management. Performed weekly analytics on engagement and sentiment.
- Managed email marketing campaigns across customer lifecycle. Achieved email open rates 10% above industry benchmarks through targeted segmentation and testing of content, design, subject lines, and send times. Managed email service provider and CRM platform.
- Implemented tracking and attribution modeling of digital activities. Analyzed performance data to optimize budget and maximize impact of digital campaigns. Created customized reporting and dashboards on KPIs and program effectiveness for leadership.
Example 2: Software Engineer
LinkedIn Profile Summary:
- Solutions-focused software engineer with expertise in Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, Git, REST APIs, unit testing, and agile methodologies. Proven track record designing and developing high-quality enterprise applications from concept to deployment. Committed to using best practices for writing secure, well-documented code. Strong team collaborator able to clearly communicate complex architecture and design proposals across business and technical stakeholders.
Work Experience:
- Led full lifecycle development of customer-facing web application features, from gathering specifications to deployment and maintenance. Implemented responsive UI components using React and Node.js. Integrated RESTful APIs and optimized page load times.
- Architected relational database solutions to support new product initiatives and existing systems. Normalized data models and implemented indexes for high query performance. Authored complex SQL queries, functions, triggers, and stored procedures.
- Performed code reviews, unit testing, debugging, and refactoring to enhance software quality and reliability. Troubleshot live production issues at both code and infrastructure levels to resolve performance bottlenecks.
Tips for an Effective Skills Section
To make your Skills & Endorsements section even more impactful, keep these tips in mind:
- Prioritize: Showcase only your most relevant and important skills for your target role or industry. Keep it focused on your top 5-10 skills.
- Get Endorsed: Having connections endorse you for skills adds more credibility. Endorse others and ask colleagues to endorse you.
- Use Keywords: Include keywords mentioned in job listings that recruiters may search for.
- Update Often: Reevaluate your skills section regularly and keep it up-to-date as your experience and goals evolve.
Showcasing Quantifiable Achievements
In addition to listing relevant skills, you can strengthen your LinkedIn profile even more by demonstrating them through quantified achievements. This gives tangible proof of your skills in action.
For example:
- Increased website traffic by 45% through ongoing SEO optimizations.
- Generated $2.5M in new business through successful sales strategies.
- Improved product quality by 22% by implementing lean manufacturing practices.
- Reduced costs by 15% through supply chain process improvements.
Tying measurable outcomes to your efforts showcases your ability to apply skills in impactful ways that benefit organizations.
Presenting Your Skills Visually
In addition to listing skills in your profile, some members also showcase them visually. This further emphasizes the key skills you want hiring managers and recruiters to notice.
Two ways to present your skills visually are:
Skills Graph
The skills graph tool allows you to select your top skills and display them in a colorful horizontal bar graph to stand out.
Skills Matrix
A skills matrix allows you to plot your proficiency level for different skills in an excel-style grid. This lets you demonstrate depth and breadth.
For example:
Beginner | Intermediate | Advanced | Expert | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Data Analytics | X | |||
Project Management | X | |||
Social Media Marketing | X |
Examples of Top LinkedIn Profiles
For additional inspiration, here are two great examples of LinkedIn profiles that do an excellent job showcasing the member’s top skills:
Example 1: Product Marketing Manager
URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennycravino/
What stands out:
- Concise, focused profile summary highlighting key skills like market research, positioning, and cross-functional collaboration.
- Skills graph draws attention to data analysis, competitive intelligence, product launches, and more.
- Work experience strategically emphasizes metrics, ROI, and impact of product marketing initiatives.
- Endorsements for skills like PR, project management, and CRM platforms.
Example 2: Software Engineer
URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emma-wedekind-94616b39/
What stands out:
- Profile summary clearly conveys technical expertise, leadership, skills overview, and passion for solving problems with code.
- Skills matrix showcases depth of proficiency across multiple programming languages.
- Projects section highlights complexity of successfully delivered initiatives.
- Endorsements emphasize coding languages, systems analysis, and databases.
Conclusion
Your LinkedIn skills section is incredibly valuable professional real estate. By featuring your most relevant, in-demand skills you can increase the likelihood of being found by recruiters, showcase the value you bring to employers, and strengthen your personal brand.
Be selective and strategic with the skills you highlight to make the biggest impact. Keep your skills targeted to your desired job path – and remember to update them regularly as your career progresses.
With a compelling skills profile, you can maximize your chances of connecting to new opportunities and reaching your professional goals.