May 2, 2012
LinkedIn’s Skills & Expertise section is becoming more and more important in optimizing your profile for LinkedIn search. It’s a relatively new section and it is slowly replacing the Specialties section that is located right below your LinkedIn Summary. In fact, new LinkedIn users don’t even have a Specialties section anymore!
The Skills & Expertise section of your LinkedIn profile allows you to add keywords to your profile so you can get found. LinkedIn even states that by adding skills and expertise to your profile, you will appear in keyword searches. This is an actual screen grab from a LinkedIn profile:
You can add up to 50 keywords to your Skills & Expertise section. The problem, however, is that you can’t save this section if there is a duplicate item. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to have a duplicate and it’s very hard to find it in the mess of keywords.
As a LinkedIn profile writer, I have run into this issue far too many times to count… but I came up with a quick fix!
Here it is:
I hope you enjoyed this article! Let me know what you think in the comments!
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Thanks for the awesome tip! It saved my hours of work!
I am so glad to hear my tip saved you time! That’s your most valuable resource, you know 🙂
Hi Donna,
thanks for this tip. I actually should have done this in the first place, since it is obvious to do. Maybe too obvious for a seasoned programmer to see the simplicity 🙂
Hi Christian!
Thanks for commenting on my blog. I know what you mean. I can’t tell you how many profiles I struggled through, straining to find the duplicate when it suddenly hit me… EXCEL!
Glad it helped you!
–Donna
If you have endorsements, do text to column – delimited, fixed width to separate the endorsement count from the text. You can also get rid of the hyperlinks easily by copying the column, paste special, Values to another column then copy, paste back to original column.
Hi Darlene! Thanks for the additional suggestions!
Thank you so much. You saved me tons of time! It’s stupid that LinkedIn doesn’t point out the dup.
This is an excellent tip! I kept overlooking a variation on a single one word item in the list (WordPress vs WordPress–too bad that fixing the duplicate meant losing a couple of endorsements…)
I was having a tough time figuring this one out and thought surely there was a bug since the duplicate wasn’t highlighted. Thank you for the tip!
The really valuable thing related to this would be to figure out how to convince LinkedIn to fix the bug that is creating these duplicates in the first place or to allow merging of endorsements for duplicate skills.
Even though I have had more endorsements for “RTL design” for many years, LinkedIn continues to encourage my connections for endorsement for “RTL Design” At one point, I even deleted my “RTL Design” skill and lost its endorsements. However, LinkedIn recreated the duplicate by continuing encouraging connections to endorse for “RTL Design” So LinkedIn can detect the duplicate and block any editing of endorsements until the duplicate is deleted, but it can’t stop prompting connections for the wrong one!?