The Best Skills to Put on LinkedIn (and What Endorsements Are Worth)

Structured beats prose, and that is the point

Everything else you write on LinkedIn is free text. Anything reading free text has to work out what the words mean and how much they matter. A structured field does not have that problem — a skill tag is an unambiguous claim drawn from a controlled list of terms, and it can be used as a filter rather than a guess.

That is the whole argument for taking the section seriously, and it explains why it rewards precision rather than volume. Adding a skill you do not have is not clever, because it is a claim that gets tested. Failing to add one you do have is a straightforward and silent cost: you are simply absent from a filter you would have passed.

1. Open three to five current postings for the role you want next, not the one you have.
2. List every named skill, tool, system, methodology and certification appearing in at least two of them.
3. Cross out anything you cannot honestly claim, and be strict — the list is a set of assertions, not aspirations.
4. Add what remains, using LinkedIn's suggested term wherever its wording matches the postings.
5. Pin the three that best describe the work you want, since those are shown first.
6. Attach each skill to the specific role where you used it, which the profile editor allows and which makes the claim considerably more credible.

What good skill lists look like

The failure mode at one end is a list of abstractions — Communication, Leadership, Teamwork, Microsoft Office — which nobody filters on because everybody claims them. The failure mode at the other end is a list so narrow no search will ever contain it: an internal tool your last employer built, a proprietary framework, a version number.

Roughly the same reasoning applies to your resume, though the two are not identical exercises: a resume skills block is tailored per application and constrained by page space, while the profile list is permanent and can afford to be broader. The resume skills guide covers that side, and the examples library shows how the terms sit in finished documents across a few hundred roles.

What endorsements actually tell a reader

An endorsement is one click by one person, frequently prompted by the platform, sometimes from someone who has never seen you do the thing. Everyone in hiring knows this. The sensible reading is that endorsement counts are weak evidence at best, and that treating them as a score to be maximised is a poor use of your effort.

There are two exceptions worth knowing. The first is the zero case: a skills list where nothing has any endorsements can read as though the profile has no professional context around it, which is a mild negative. The second is the mismatch case: forty endorsements for a technology you left behind five years ago, sitting at the top of the list, actively contradicts the direction your headline claims. That is not a neutral leftover, it is a counter-argument.

How many is enough

A handful on your pinned skills is plenty. Past that the returns fall away sharply, and nobody is counting.

Who is worth asking

People who actually saw the work. Endorse colleagues genuinely first — reciprocation is common and does not need to be requested.

Irrelevant ones

Remove the skill, or hide the individual endorsement. Both are in the profile editor and both are normal housekeeping.

Skill assessments

LinkedIn offers optional tests on some skills, with a badge for passing and no public record of a failure. Modest value, low cost. Worth doing for one or two core technical skills, not worth farming.

Endorsement swaps

Trading endorsements with strangers to inflate counts is visible for what it is and adds nothing. It also sits on the path towards automation tools that breach the platform's terms of use.

Pruning: the part nobody does

Skills accumulate. You added some years ago, LinkedIn suggested some, colleagues endorsed you for things you mentioned once, and the list quietly stopped describing you. If you are changing direction this is the single most damaging piece of stale content on the profile, precisely because it is structured — it is not merely unhelpful, it is actively filing you into the wrong searches.

• Every skill in the top three is one you want to be hired for next year, not one you were hired for last time.
• No skill on the list is something you would be uncomfortable being questioned about in an interview.
• Technologies you have not touched in five years are gone, unless your field genuinely still values them.
• The generic ones — Communication, Teamwork — sit at the bottom, or not at all.
• Terms match the wording used in the postings you are actually applying to.
• Each skill is attached to the role where you used it.
• Nothing in the list contradicts your headline or your About section.

Career changers should be especially unsentimental here. If your profile says you are moving into instructional design while your skills section is still ranked by nine years of laboratory endorsements, the structured data is arguing against your prose — and the structured data is what the filter reads. The career change guide makes the same argument for the resume.

What this section cannot do

It cannot substitute for evidence. A skill tag is an unsupported claim, and the Experience section is where it becomes credible — which is exactly why attaching skills to specific roles is worth the minutes it takes. A profile listing thirty skills with no work history demonstrating any of them reads precisely as thin as it is.

To sanity-check what you have, paste your profile into the LinkedIn profile audit, which scores the sections against a target role you supply. If the headline and About need work first, the optimiser drafts those. Neither tool touches your LinkedIn account — both work on text you paste in and hand text back. For non-commercial background on describing skills in the labour market, the National Careers Service is a reasonable outside reference, and LinkedIn's own user agreement is worth a skim before you entertain any tool offering to build skills or endorsements for you automatically.