LinkedIn skills section: which skills to list

What is the LinkedIn skills section for?

The skills section is a list of standard skill names attached to your profile. Recruiters can filter searches on it, and LinkedIn uses it to compare you with job postings. LinkedIn's Recruiter help calls the skills in this section "standardized," so the same skill carries the same name across profiles.

LinkedIn's Talent Blog said in an April 2024 post on listing skills that "nearly half (48%) of hirers on LinkedIn now explicitly use skills data to fill their roles." The same post cited LinkedIn data that members who list at least one skill receive up to 2x more profile views and connection requests. That is LinkedIn's own figure about its own product, and it compares people with skills to people with none.

So the question is less whether to fill the section and more which skills to put in it. The short answer: the skills your target jobs ask for, that you can prove with an example.

How many skills can you add on LinkedIn?

You can add up to 100 skills. LinkedIn's Help Center page on adding and removing skills says, "You can add up to 100 skills to your profile." The 2024 Talent Blog post gave a limit of 50, so older advice you read may quote the lower number.

A higher cap does not mean you should fill it. A long list of loosely related skills makes it harder for a reader to see what you do best. A practical target is the 10 to 30 skills that appear again and again in the jobs you want, plus any tools you use every week.

To add a skill on desktop, LinkedIn's steps are: Me, then View Profile, then Add profile section, then Core, then Add skills. You type a skill or pick one from the suggestions. Then you tick the checkboxes that show where you put the skill to use.

How do recruiters use your LinkedIn skills?

Recruiters can require a skill, prefer it, or exclude it. LinkedIn's Recruiter help page on filtering search results says the dropdown lets a recruiter "select Can have, Must have, or Doesn't have" on filters such as job titles, locations, companies and skills. A Must have skill you didn't list may drop you from that search.

LinkedIn Recruiter also has a Skills Match filter for people who applied to a job. The help page separates explicit skills, which are "listed in the applicant's skill section of the profile, which are standardized," from implicit skills, which are "extracted from text within any section of the member's profile." The applicant and the job must be in the same country, except within the European Economic Area.

That means your About section, job descriptions and headline also count toward implicit skills. Writing a skill into an Experience entry and adding it to the skills section gives a recruiter two ways to find it. The page on how recruiters search LinkedIn covers the other filters they use.

Which skills should you list on LinkedIn?

List the skills that show up in the postings you want and that you can back with a real example. Collect five postings for your target role, copy every skill they mention, and count how often each one appears. The skills that appear in most postings go first, if you have them.

Use LinkedIn's standard name for each skill. When you type in the Add skills box, pick the suggestion that matches the posting's wording, such as "Data analysis" or "Customer relationship management (CRM)." The Talent Blog post says members choose from over 41,000 skill titles, so a close match usually exists.

Then cut anything you couldn't talk about for two minutes in an interview. A recruiter or hiring manager may ask about any skill on your profile. The page on resume keywords shows the same method for your resume, and the two lists should mostly match.

Here is an example for a marketing coordinator, built from the skills that repeat across five sample postings:

• Email marketing, Google Analytics, HubSpot, Content writing, Social media marketing
• Project coordination, Copy editing, Canva, Search engine optimization (SEO), Reporting
• Communication, Teamwork, Time management

Where should each skill appear on your profile?

Put each important skill in at least two places: the skills section and the job where you used it. LinkedIn's add skill form asks you to tick where you used the skill, which links it to an Experience or Education entry. A skill linked to a real job reads as evidence, and an unlinked skill reads as a claim.

This table shows where skills can appear and what each placement does, based on LinkedIn's help pages.

The guides to LinkedIn headline examples and About section examples show how to work your top skills into those sections in plain sentences.

Do LinkedIn skill endorsements matter?

Endorsements show that people you know back a skill, and LinkedIn says they carry some weight. The Help Center page on skill endorsements says skills "can be validated by 1st-degree connections to reinforce their weighting." It does not say how much weight, so treat endorsements as a small extra.

Only your 1st-degree connections can endorse you, and you don't need to ask for them. You can hide an endorsement you don't want to show, or opt out of endorsements entirely. If you change a skill's name or language, LinkedIn says you have to delete it and add it again, which permanently removes its endorsements.

If you want endorsements, ask former coworkers to endorse the one or two skills they saw you use. A short, specific request is easier to say yes to.

Example: Hi Lena, I'm updating my LinkedIn for a job search. If you're comfortable with it, would you endorse me for SQL? You saw the reporting work on the Q3 project. Happy to do the same for you.

What order should your skills be in?

Put the skills your target jobs ask for most at the top. The Talent Blog post advises stack ranking your skills so recruiters see your strongest ones first. To reorder, open the Skills section, select the pencil icon, choose the More menu, then the reorder icon, and drag skills into place.

A reader who opens your profile sees the top of the list first. Use those spots for skills that are specific to your field, such as a tool or a method. Broad skills like communication and teamwork can sit lower, since LinkedIn's data puts them among the most common skills.

The Talent Blog post listed LinkedIn's most common skills on profiles at the time, led by communication, teamwork, problem solving, analytical skills and leadership. The post also noted that these frequency lists are not a perfect guide to what recruiters want. Common skills are easy to list and hard to stand out with.

Which skills should you leave off?

Leave off skills you used once years ago, tools you have only read about, and skills that point toward a job you no longer want. Each one dilutes the list and invites interview questions you can't answer well. A shorter list you can defend works better than a long one you can't.

• Old software versions nobody hires for anymore.
• Skills from a career you've left, unless the new role uses them.
• Generic words that don't match a LinkedIn skill title, such as "hard worker."
• Any skill a posting lists that you don't have. Add it after you learn it.

How do you check your skills against a real job?

Paste a target posting next to your profile and mark each skill the posting asks for. If you have it, make sure it appears in your skills section and in a job entry. If you don't have it, leave it off and decide whether to learn it.

Do the same check on your resume. The free resume optimizer compares every line of your resume with a posting. A fact-locked resume keeps the claims to things you have confirmed, which is the same rule that keeps your skills list honest.

For the rest of your profile, the LinkedIn profile optimization checklist covers the photo, headline, About section and experience in order. Once your skills list is set, be ready to back each one with a story; the guide to behavioral interview questions shows how.