LinkedIns Top 10 Skills of 2016 - What This List Means for You

LinkedIns Top 10 Skills of 2016 - What This List Means for You The day after I posted last week’s blog on What’s New on LinkedIn, LinkedIn unveiled its top skills to get you hired in 2017. This list is a very important one  for job seekers – especially for those with technical skills! In fact, all the top 10 skills globally and in the US are in the technical realm. Here are the global top 10 LinkedIn Skills: And here are the top 10 LinkedIn Skills for the United States: Only a handful of  non-technical items made  it to the list in a range of countries. Here are some (not all) of the skills that showed up: HR Benefits and Compensation (Australia, Brazil, and the UK) Compliance and Employment Law (France) Corporate Law and Governance (Australia, Singapore, France, and United Arab Emirates) Business Development and Relationship Management (Brazil) Public Policy and International Relations (China, Singapore, United Arab Emirates and South Africa) Business Intelligence (China) PR and Communications (India), Recruiting (Ireland and the Netherlands) Foreign Language Translation (Singapore) Renewable and Sustainable Energy (United Arab Emirates) A range of marketing skills (multiple countries). According to LinkedIn, some important trends are emerging: Data and cloud skills (which may include migration, cloud security, network overlays, containers, configuration management, database management, big data and analytics, cloud monitoring and visibility, hyper-convergence, and application optimization) top the list in almost every country across North America, the European Union and Asia. This trend is not surprising since there were 18 million cloud computing jobs globally in 2015! Statistical analysis and data mining also hold high rank. Companies need these cutting edge technological skills to stay competitive. If you’ve got ‘em, you’re golden. Demand for marketers and SEO/SEM professionals has shrunk. Apparently, there are so many people with these skills that the jobs are pretty much taken. Data presentation is on the list for the first time ever. Companies care not just that people have skills, but that they can communicate technical information clearly in reports (with charts, histograms and graphs) and on dashboards. Visualize, visualize, visualize! User interface design is on the rise, moving from #14 in 2014 to #10 in 2015 to #5 this year. Hmmm maybe this is why my last client seeking a UI position got 3 interviews and a position he loves within a month! UI design is what makes products, from computers and mobile devices to electronics and household appliances, easy for customers to use. Do you have any of these skills? If so, make sure to add them to your LinkedIn profile! Here’s how: In Edit Profile view, scroll down to your Skills section and click on the Add skill button: You will have the option to allow LinkedIn to suggest endorsements for you to your connections, see endorsement suggestions from your connections, and/or receive email notifications when connections endorse you. To add skills, begin typing your desired skill and you will be given a list to choose from; whenever possible, choose skills that auto-populate, since these are the skills most searched for, especially by recruiters. However, you do not need to stick to the list. You can add up to 50 skills. Remember, recruiters with LinkedIn Recruiter can search for people based on their skills. So don’t discount this section! And get endorsements too. The best way to do that is to endorse other people for their skills. LinkedIn is honoring the release of their top skills list with a week of free learning from October 24th to 30th! In the Week of Learning, you can take any of LinkedIn Learning’s 5,000+ courses for free. This is a rare opportunity so if you have any time in your schedule this week, take advantage of it! Want to know more about the methodology behind LinkedIn’s top skills list? Check out the Top Skills Methodology paragraph at the bottom of their article. It did not escape my attention that I do not have a single skill on any of LinkedIn’s top 10 lists. Thankfully, my job is to help other people promote the skills that they have. And it’s important to keep in mind that the skills on these lists are the ones sought after by recruiters and others doing their hiring through LinkedIn. So if you, like I do, have skills that are sought after by people other than recruiters, you’re still in good shape. Keep doing what you’re doing- that’s my plan!