LinkedIn Skills – 20 Best And Most In Demand Ones

This everything you need to know about the hottest LinkedIn Skills to have on your profile. We have a mix of both soft skills and hard skills that will be important to showcase how effective of a candidate you are.

To increase the chances of you being contacted by recruiters or hiring managers, make sure to read and implement the below for skills on your LinkedIn Profile.

March 2, 2024 by Kazu Fujimoto

The Top 10 Most In-Demand Skills

According to LinkedIn, the most in-demand skills are the following:

1. Management
2. Communication
3. Customer Service
4. Leadership
5. Sales
6. Project Management
7. Research
8. Analytical Skills
9. Marketing
10. Teamwork

You will want to learn how to quantify your accomplishments along with specifying these skills to make sure you stand out among other candidates when employers are looking at LinkedIn profiles for employees.

The Top 10 Most In-Demand Hard Skills

According to LinkedIN, the top 10 most in-demand HARD skills are the following:

1. Software Development
2. SQL
3. Finance
4. Python
5. Java
6. Data analysis
7. JavaScript
8. Cloud computing
9. Operations
10. Customer Relationship Management

If you want to increase your chances of landing a higher paying job, then you’ll need to focus on industries such as tech and finance and develop these skills.

Why you need to add skills on your LinkedIn Profile

The more skills that you add to your profile, the more you show that you will be capable of the role that you’re applying to. Along with showing your capability and competence, your LinkedIn profile becomes more relevant the more skills you add.

Recruiters and hiring managers will be using functions such as LinkedIn search to find candidates with a specific skill.

For example, if we use the keyword “software development” and type that up into the LinkedIn search bar, we will be able to see potential candidates that we would be able to hire. Recruiters and hiring managers will use parameters such as job titles and search using “people” as the filter to find qualified candidates for their roles.

The game of LinkedIn Optimization is to make it so that your profile has the highest likelihood of popping up so that recruiters and hiring managers will contact you for opportunities.

How to add skills on LinkedIn

To add skills in your LinkedIn Profile, scroll down to the skills section and select on the “pencil” icon to edit.

Once you do so, this will open up a window which shows all of the skills that you have listed on your LinkedIn profile.

Click on the “+” sign to add any and all skills that are relevant to you. Refer to the above for the Top 20 most in demand skills that we have laid out for you.

In this window, you have the option to type in any skills that you have underneath the “Skill*” or you can add skills based on suggestions based on your profile. We recommend you do both and add as many skills you can.

Additionally, you should seek professional colleagues for endorsements regarding your skills. Think of this as a testimonial for a product. Nowadays, most people won’t even buy products without any reviews on them – view endorsements for skills as something similar.

LinkedIn Skill Assessment

As of this writing (December 2023), LinkedIn Skill Assessments are no longer available.

The LinkedIn Skills assessment was an opportunity for you to demonstrate competence in the specific skills that you had in your profile. These assessments consisted of things such as multiple choice questions that tested concepts and sub skills. The assessments were timed and had to be completed in an initial session.

Upon completion of these assessments, you will be able to obtain things such as a “skill badge”, which could look attractive to recruiters if they are looking to hire for a certain skill.

Unfortunately, the option to test for LinkedIn Skill Assessments is currently not available, so the next best option to demonstrate your value and competence is to reach out to colleagues for endorsements.

Why you should endorse skills on LinkedIn

Endorsing skills, especially by those who are highly skilled at the respective skill, will make you seem more authentic and credible. As a result, this will make it more likely for recruiters and hiring managers to reach out for you because you have the experience and skillset.

Ask yourself – are you more likely to hire a candidate if they’ve been endorsed for a certain skills vs. if they haven’t?

Chances are, you would hire the candidate with the endorsement as opposed to the one without the endorsement.

This is why we recommend that you get skill endorsements on your profile.

How to endorse skills on LinkedIn

Reach out to anyone that you know academically or professionally and see if they would endorse you for a certain skillset. It doesn’t take too much to reach out and can net you a huge benefit in terms of more job interviews and opportunities!

Hey, hope all is well. I’m reaching out and wondering if you’d be willing to endorse me for X skillset.

– How to reach out for skill endorsements on LinkedIn

We love simple methods and frameworks – you don’t need a fancy way to reach out, just use something simple such as the above way we have called out. If they answer, great! If not, then it’s not the end of the world.

Soft Skills vs Hard Skills

We heavily lean on specifying hard skills in resume writing to show that you can physically and tangibly get things done. The problem with specifying soft skills is that anyone can simply say that they have soft skills. But hard skills, such as software are harder to come by and can prove competence far more than only having soft skills.

Soft Skills in LinkedIn Profile

See above for the Top 10 Most In-Demand soft skills. Make sure to specify them into your skills section as we have shown how above.

The important thing with soft skills is that you will need to know how to quantify these accomplishments, much like writing a resume. Anyone can say they have soft skills, but when you combine these with your business impact is how you stand out amongst candidates.

Hard Skills in LinkedIn Profile

Hard skills will be associated with something you can physically create and produce, which will yield business results. These are much more important to have than soft skills.

Make sure to fill up the skills section with any and all hard skills you have – software, technical competencies, calculation methods, analysis, etc.

Additionally, make sure to combine these hard skills as bullet points and quantify these respective accomplishments to show your business impact.

Closing Thoughts on LinkedIn Skills

The LinkedIn Skills section is an important one to nail down on your profile. As a result, you will need to implement these frameworks if you want to stay in the Top 1% of your candidates. Utilizing these LinkedIn Optimization frameworks will make it more likely that your profile will pop up. As a result, you’ll get more DMs, interviews, and job offers.

Make sure to check out our LinkedIn Optimization service to boost chances of landing your next dream opportunity.

LinkedIn Skills FAQ