A new tool from LinkedIn allows you to find the top skills employers want candidates to have for almost any job position.
In addition, if there’s a skill you need and don’t have, the tool will direct you to resources available for building up the skill.
The “Future of Skills” data tool from LinkedIn will show you how requirements for jobs have changed from 2015 to 2021.
According to a recent LinkedIn analysis, top skills for a given role have changed by roughly 25% from 2015 to today, and may increase to a change of 40% by 2025.
Here’s how to use LinkedIn’s new tool to discover the skills needed to become a standout candidate when applying for your next job.
Alternately, this tool ca be useful for keeping your skill set up-to-date, thereby increasing your value in your current role.
LinkedIn’s Future Of Skills Tool
To get started, navigate to the Future Of Skills tool and scroll all the way to the bottom until you get to the section shown in the below screenshot.
Screenshot from: linkedin.github.io/future-of-skills, March 2022.
You can search for top skills by industry or by job title, then you can filter those results by country.
The tool will surface the top skills needed today along with a comparison of the top skills needed in 2015.
You’ll also get an analysis of:
- How much the top skills have changed
- Which of the top skills are new
- Which of the top skills are the same
- Which of the top skills went up or down in importance
Here’s what the Future Of Skills tools surfaces for the job title of Search Engine Optimization Specialist in the United States.
Screenshot from: linkedin.github.io/future-of-skills, March 2022.
As you can see in the example above, a significant number of the top skills needed are marked as new.
That means more employers are looking for candidates to have those skills today than they were in 2015.
If you want to increase your chances of getting hired as an SEO specialist this year, these are the skills you should have.
Let’s say you don’t have all the skills. Maybe you have almost all of them but you’re not familiar with SEMrush, for example.
What you can do now is click on SEMrush and LinkedIn will take you to a selection of relevant learning courses.
Screenshot from: LinkedIn.com/learning, March 2022.
All LinkedIn users get a one month free trial to access any and all learning courses available on the website.
After that there’s a monthly fee to take the courses, or you can pay for a single course and access it any time you want.
In Summary
LinkedIn’s Future Of Skills tool is a comprehensive resource of top skills candidates are required to have in almost any industry or job position.
Employers can also use it if they’re hiring for a certain position and aren’t sure what skills to look for.
This might be the most valuable collection of data about top job skills LinkedIn has made available.
LinkedIn regularly publishes annual reports about top jobs and job skills, but they never include as much data as you can find using the Future Of Skills tool.
Source: LinkedIn Future Of Skills
