LinkedIn is secretive about releasing skill ranking data but with a bit of sleuthing and reverse engineering our team was able to quantify the likely list of top 20 keywords in the Skills & Endorsement section of LinkedIn personal profiles. We started with LinkedIn’s publishing of the top skills for 2015 and 2016 globally and added current membership data, from the Topics Directory, for those skills. The data, pulled on February 12, 2018, list in csv, tabular data format is available by clicking here.
There are thousands of ever evolving skills that members can add to their profiles, so these skills are grouped into several dozen categories. The keywords that auto populate within the selection tool in personal profiles are the most popular. If your goal is to increase visibility for a job search or grow sales leads, it helps to use a mix of some of the prepopulated words relevant for your accomplishments but also use niche words that will help you stand out from the crowd. Skill relevancy is more important than size for landing a job or a sale. Below we quantified the size of some of our clients most popular skills to provide insight on the size of the industry strength within LinkedIn.
The list above only includes hard skills, abilities that can be defined and measured, for example coding, analytics technology development. It does not include soft skills that are more difficult to quantify, such as trust, team work, communication and organization.
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