How to Use LinkedIn’s Skills & Expertise Section to Research Careers

Knowing what jobs match your skills is just as important as receiving the right career training when choosing a career. Luckily, LinkedIn has developed a great tool to help you learn more about the types of jobs that fit your skill set as well as give you ideas for career you many not have considered.

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The new tool is in the “Skills & Expertise” section, under the “More” tab in LinkedIn. On this page you will be able to enter a career title, skill or keyword into the Search box.

The search results provide you with a wide variety of topics and information to explore and help you decide which career is right for you. Some examples of the information you will find include:

Skills defined. A description of the related career is displayed in the center top of the page. This description includes the primary industry of which it’s a part, but view these descriptions with a grain of salt. The definitions are taken from Wikipedia and have varying levels of accuracy. The small arrow in the box that is pointing up or down is an indication of the amount of positive or negative growth expected from that career field.


Affiliated expertise. A list of “Related Skills” is shown to the left of the description that provides general guidance about other careers that use skills similar to the terms you entered into your search. This list provides you a window into an expansive circle of opportunities that align with your skills.

Professionals with similar skills. This section, located under the career description provides you a list of LinkedIn members who have listed skills similar to those you entered into your search. Viewing these profiles will allow you to see these individual’s career histories (both present as well as past positions) and what keywords they list to summarize their professional experience and abilities. Knowing how others in your desired career field describe themselves should give you ideas on what keywords you want to use in your own profile. Finally, this section will show you how many of these people you are connected to through LinkedIn.

Historical and predicted growth. The small chart located at the top right of the page provides insight into growth trends of the career. Is the career growing or contracting? Are there particular aspects of the career that are experiencing expanding at a quicker rate? The chart shown in this section will provide the answers.


Notable employers. The “Related Companies” section lists notable employers in your area of interest. This section will direct you to their company page. Take advantage of this feature to learn more about the company’s services, products and culture as well as potential job openings.

Find related groups. Why do LinkedIn groups matter? Groups provide one more avenue to explore a career, including the roles and responsibilities of the people in that career, where they work, and their thoughts about the industry. Groups also provide a way to connect with professionals in that career and start building your professional network. For those reasons, be sure to check out the groups section listed on the lower left side of the page.

Opportunities and Openings. Even if you’re not ready to send in your resume, reading the various job descriptions can prove worthwhile. Job descriptions allow you to see what employers are looking for in terms of skills and experience. They can also show you what type of work will be expected in a given career so you can determine whether it suits you or not. Additionally, you’ll be able to monitor what keywords employers are using so you can be sure to have these terms in your LinkedIn profile.

The LinkedIn “Skills & Expertise” section is a terrific launching pad to begin evaluating your career options. Using this tool will help you weigh all potential job opportunities, their key characteristics and responsibilities and who in your network may be an asset as you pursue a career path. But, the section is not just for job search newbies, it can also help more seasoned professionals determine how to expand existing skills or prepare for a career change.

Government Moves Toward Cloud Computing 'Perfect Storm'

Amid mounting budget pressures and a maturing set of technologies, the federal government is poised for the rapid adoption of cloud computing services over the next several years, according to one of the senior agency leaders helping craft a government-wide cloud strategy.

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While federal tech chiefs have long envisioned an environment in which agency storage and applications are hosted and shared throughout the government, the policy reforms required for such a shift, though still very much a work in progress, have recently come into focus and figure to precipitate a major migration to the cloud over the next several years, said David McClure, the associate administrator of the General Services Administration's Office Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies.

FHU enters Apple 'Distinguished program'

A university that offers all freshmen and staff iPads has been entered into Apple’s Distinguished program.

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Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tennessee, has been entered in to Apple’s ‘Distinguished’ program for mobile technology use in the classroom.

Dubbed the ‘iKnow 2.0‘ initiative, the scheme has run since 2008. In the beginning, each student was furnished with a MacBook and their choice of either an iPhone or iPod Touch. For the 2012/2013 academic year, all freshman will instead be issued with an iPad as standard, although students can bring their own device if they wish. Approximately 2,000 students are currently enrolled at the university.

FHU considers itself a ‘MacBook campus’, and therefore implements Apple technology in the classroom on a daily basis — supporting both MacBooks and iPad use. However, as the academic institution also makes use of Microsoft products, it is common place for Macbooks to run Windows software, which students can have installed for free.

The use of iPads and MacBooks are firmly integrated into the school curriculum. Students enrolled at the university are now expected to bring a MacBook with them, or purchase one on-site.

Laptops are no longer provided by the school — but students can expect a free copy of Microsoft Office after enrollment. The software remains the property of the student as long as they graduate from FHU. Mark Scott, vice president for technology and innovation said:

“We are extremely pleased to receive this honor from Apple. Since 2008, Freed-Hardeman has pioneered the use of mobile technologies to accommodate anywhere, anytime learning. The selection of FHU as an Apple Distinguished Program highlights its successes in enhancing and extending teaching and learning with thoughtful and innovative implementations of technology.”

To qualify for the designation of the Apple Distinguished Program, an educational institution must be seen to be a “recognised centre of educational excellence and leadership.” The use of Apple products, especially considering the recent release of updates to iTunes U and iBooks 2, appears to be becoming more popular and integrated within schools systems — and by offering schemes like the ‘Distinguished’ program, Apple keeps this trend expanding.

lfresco 4.0 heads for the cloud

In anticipation of offering its open-source content management software as a service, Alfresco has upgraded its namesake product to work with multiple clients and to interact with a wider range of form factors, the company announced Thursday.

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"Alfresco Enterprise 4.0 is the foundational element in our cloud strategy," said Todd Barr, Alfresco chief marketing officer. The company is preparing to offer the CMS (content management software) as SaaS (software as a service) by April or May this year.

Alfresco 4.0, released Thursday, features a number of new and upgraded features that will make it more cloud-friendly, including allowing access from mobile devices, a more flexible browser interface and various back-end performance improvements, Barr said.

The software now can be accessed by iPhone and iPad clients. Users can start a process and annotate, edit and save documents that reside in an Alfresco repository. Organizations can also build connectors to other mobile clients.

The user interface has been augmented with some modern Web 2.0 touches as well. As on Facebook, users can now click a button that indicates they approve of, or like, a particular piece of content. And as on Twitter, they can follow other users. Users can now directly publish content out to social networking sites such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr and Facebook. The company also plans to add integration with the DropBox storage service later this year.

The interface, which is accessed by a browser, now allows files to be moved by dragging them with a mouse and dropping them into the desired locations. The interface can show a preview of more file types.

On the back end, Alfresco 4.0 has been reengineered in a number of ways that should make it work well in a multi-tenant environment. Administrators can now break out the Alfresco Share collaboration application and Alfresco Index Server and run them on separate servers, which can increase the speed of large deployments. Or, administrators can set up multiple instances of Alfresco and run them side by side.

The company has also refactored some of the code, resulting in what it claims are performance improvements. Content can be uploaded three times as quickly. Dashboard queries are accelerated by a factor of 10, and document libraries are loaded 25 percent to 50 percent more quickly, the company claims.

This version of the software will set the stage for running Alfresco's cloud CMS service, Barr said. Alfresco currently is running a private beta of its hosted offering and plans to offer the service commercially within the next few months.

The primary users of the cloud service might be organizations that already run Alfresco in-house but need to make some material available outside the firewall for collaboration and for employees working outside the office, Barr said. The company will launch a synchronization service for organizations to move their content between their in-house deployments and the hosted offering.

Introduced in 2005, Alfresco is an open-source CMS. Alfresco Enterprise is the commercial version of the freely downloadable Alfresco Community. Alfresco Community 4.0 was released last October. The enterprise edition has all the functionality of the community edition, with a number of additional management tools as well, Barr explained.

Alfresco 4.0 is priced starting at about US$20,000 and goes up based on the number of processors used.