4251 LinkedIn Skills

My good friend Pritesh Patel complained over the weekend that he couldn’t put one handed clapping as one of his skills on LinkedIn.

I can clap with one hand. Why is it not possible to add this onto my LinkedIn profile as a skill?

— Pritesh Patel (@priteshpatel9) November 2, 2013

What skills does LinkedIn allow? It used to be that anything went (hence my expertise in bow hunting and nunchucks) but it seems they have locked things down recently.

The API used to make the autocompletes for skills is easy to access. Below are the results for every pair of starting letters (“aa”,“ab”,“ac”,…,“zy”,“zz”).

There are of course some odd skills. Here are some of my favourites:

• “Playing by ear” - is this something musical or does it mean winging it?
• In quick succession we see “snort”, “sniffer” and “sniper”
• “Beer”
• “Eggplant”
• “Karaoke”
• “Natural gas”, “pumps” and “wind”