About Me

I ramble about a number of things - but travel experiences, movies and music feature prominently. See my label cloud for a better idea. All comnments and opinions on this blog are my own, and do not in any way reflect the opinions/position of my employer (past/current/future).

02 February 2013

LinkedIn's Skills

A few months ago, LinkedIn introduced "Skills", and the ability for your contacts to endorse such skills. On the surface, it's a cool idea; similar to tags for a profile, and gives a quick overview of a person's capabilities.

There are however some shortcomings that I have noticed over the past few months, both from profiles of my contacts and the endorsements I have received myself. I don't think skills and endorsements are used actively yet; but since LinkedIn is effectively a living and breathing CV; getting it right would be nice.

Firstly, having an endorsement doesn't necessarily mean that the person is capable of making a judgement for such an endorsement. There are many types of contacts on LinkedIn, and not all endorsements are equal.

Secondly, there is no mechanism to make a negative endorsement. Thus, maybe someone thinks they have an actual skill, but in reality, they don't. Some of it seems to be pure embellishment, some of it misguided and some of it just lying - negative endorsements could help leveling the playing filed a bit.

Lastly, while some skills are well defined; my own experience of people populating the skills is rather broad. Thus, skills have become broad terms like "security" or "sales" instead of actual depth. Not all people are specialists, but there seems to be too many generalists.

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