LinkedIn Endorsements are the Skills & Expertise that you can be endorsed for and display on your profile. You can list up to 50 skills, and each time someone endorses you for a skill, their profile image is displayed next to that skill, and the number of times you’ve been endorsed for that specific skill goes up by one.
Because your connections can endorse you for virtually anything, and because LinkedIn encourages you to almost blindly endorse your other connections, many have ridiculed the Skills & Expertise as being worthless and a pure gamification of the LinkedIn profile. And they’re not completely wrong. However, we’ve talked in the past about the Secret Benefits of LinkedIn Endorsements which demonstrate that there are, in fact, quite a few benefits to the section and feature, if used correctly. They’re actually an important part of the Perfect LinkedIn Profile.
But what happens if you just aren’t interested in displaying some skills? What if you don’t want to deal with random people endorsing you for skills you don’t possess? Or what if, even more importantly, you’re in an industry, like financial advice, where perhaps it’s inappropriate to display individual endorsements. Some businesses and industries are so regulated, such an endorsement may be seen in a different light and could cause irreparable harm to you and your business.
You can pay attention to the endorsements that come in and choose whether or not you want to display them. You can also fill up your Skills & Expertise with 50 skills that you’ve hand-picked and are comfortable displaying, and let people endorse you all day on those skills. But, for some, it might be better to simply hide the entire Skills & Expertise section.
Fortunately, hiding your Skills & Expertise section is easy.
- Log into your LinkedIn account, go to your profile, and click on the Edit Profile button.
- Scroll down to Skills & Expertise and click on Edit.
- Click on the Display Your Endorsements option and select, “No, do not display my endorsements.”
And that’s it. Your Skills & Expertise will no longer be a part of your profile. I would recommend that you also adjust your notifications settings to no longer receive endorsement emails or notifications. I’m not sure if anyone would still be able to endorse you at all, but you might as well be able to ignore them.
If you simply cannot display endorsed skills on your profile, this should help you have less to deal with from other LinkedIn connections.
If you’d like more help with LinkedIn, please let me know.