LinkedIn profile spring cleaning suggestions, part 9 of 15

This is part 9 of 15, expanding on my earlier plog.

IMHO the Skills and Experience section has gone out of control. LinkedIn apparently doesn’t agree with me. That’s because there are over 1 billion skills endorsements out there. If that’s a success, I offer my unscientific estimate that 65% of the billion are not reliable since so many people endorse without any experience of your skills in that area.

To make lemonade out of a very sour lemon, do these things now:

• Recast your Skills with laser-focus: a skill called “analysis” is vague (is that psychoanalysis? financial analysis?) and nowhere as clear as “competitive retail market analysis.”
• Looking backward, cull out endorsers who don’t directly know each skill directly, but somehow endorsed you for it anyhow.
• Tired of people endorsing you for skills you don’t show on your profile? Weary of being prompted by LinkedIn to endorse your connections? Finally! LinkedIn just made an adjustment to the Skills section on your profile, giving you more control going forward.  Here’s what you can do.

1. Click “Edit” on your profile tab.
2. Scroll down to Skills & Endorsements.
3. Click “Edit.”
4. Decide if you want to leave “I want to be endorsed” as checked as Yes.
5. Uncheck “Include me in endorsement suggestions to my connections.” (good riddance to that!)
6. Decide if you want to leave “Show me suggestions to endorse my connections” checked as Yes (if you need LinkedIn to suggest people to endorse.)
7. Decide if you need to check or uncheck “Send me notifications via email when my connections endorse me.”
8. Scroll back up to the top of my profile and clicked “Done Editing.”

Ta da! You own the section now.