Six months ago, LinkedIn launched a new feature called Endorsements, which is located in the "Skills & Expertise" section near the bottom of your profile.
Endorsements let your connections vote up your skills and areas of expertise. Your skills are then ranked and re-ranked based on how many people have endorsed them, with their profile pictures appearing next to each skill. Your connections can also add new skills to your profile that they'd like to endorse.
In March, LinkedIn announced that more than 1 billion endorsements had been given to 58 million professionals.
"Skill endorsements are a great way to help build your professional brand. In fact, you're four times more likely to be viewed on LinkedIn if you've been endorsed," says Peter Rusev, associate product manager at LinkedIn.
But not all people agree that the feature is useful. Some say it can be a false representation of your skills, since connections you may not know well can vote up any skill and add new ones that you may not want on your profile. Some LinkedIn users have resorted to using the feature in gest.
Luckily, turning off LinkedIn Endorsements is easy. Here's how to do it.
[Want more LinkedIn tips, tricks and analysis? Check out CIO.com's LinkedIn Guide.]
How to Turn Off LinkedIn Endorsements
In the main menu under "Profile" select "Edit Profile." Scroll to the Skills & Expertise section and click the pencil icon.
From the drop-down menu, choose "No, do not show my endorsements." This will remove the Endorsements section from your profile. To turn them back on, navigate to the same drop-down menu and select the other option.
If you don't want to turn off Endorsements, but want to edit the skills and expertise that appear, do so by clicking the pencil icon. An "X" will appear to each skill; click the X to remove the skill from your Endorsements.
Kristin Burnham covers consumer technology, social networking and social business for CIO.com. Follow Kristin on Twitter @kmburnham. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline and on Facebook. Email Kristin at kburnham@cio.com
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