Professional social network LinkedIn has made a few improvements to profiles today, adding the ability for members to customize their profiles with additional information.
So now, you can add new sections to the current ones on your profile (current job, past jobs, recommendations and education). Users can add published work to their profile with a link to the content; and list language proficiency, special skills (i.e. C++, Java); certifications of licenses and security clearances (i.e. CPA, SFP); and patents that they have been awarded.
I’m sure some of this information has already been added manually by many of LinkedIn’s users, but it is useful that these are now broken out to their own individual sections. Additional certifications or skills, for example, are sure to be used by many professional who want to highlight special licenses or skillsets.
While the feature addition isn’t monumental, it does show that LinkedIn is encouraging users to add more relevant professional data to their profiles. Data is a big part of the social network’s strategy going forward. For example, LinkedIn recently updated company profiles with additional data visualizations such as the most popular schools attended by employees, the segmentation of an employee base by skillset and more. And the company is using some of this data to provide career visualizations for college students and young professionals.