How credentials help your LinkedIn profile stand out

“At LinkedIn, it’s skills, skills, skills,” said Laurie Burruss, Education Innovation Advisor for LinkedIn Learning. The company lists 38,000 skills and 12,000 job titles in its taxonomy to help serve their 830 million members in more than 200 countries and territories across the globe. 

With all these members on LinkedIn, it’s important to know that adding credentials to your LinkedIn profile is how you can stand out. “We are credential agnostic, and we want everybody to put their credentials and their degrees on their profiles,” said Burruss. “The presence of certificates on your LinkedIn profile does improve the quality of your profile.”

At ShapingEDU’s Spotlight Mini-Summit: Emerging Credentials x Future Employment, Burruss shared some of the ways that credentials improve your profile:

• They help you connect to various new job opportunities. 
• Credentials increase the quality of your ability to get an interview.
• Adding related and relevant courses can help you stand out.
• Certificates show a specific set of competencies for a specific problem or task.
• They show character - the pursuit of a professional education (which is especially important to recruiters).

Did you know? LinkedIn evaluates your certificates based on the skills that it thinks that you’ve gained through that certificate, and you may not have listed those skills on your profile. Win win!

Watch Burruss’ session, Evolving Higher Education's employer partnerships to address sector-specific hiring challenges, from the Spotlight Mini-Summit: