Your Skills Are Your Competitive Edge on LinkedIn [INFOGRAPHIC]

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Members who list  skills on their LinkedIn profiles receive an average of 13 times more profile views than those who don’t. That fact alone underscores the importance of making your profile shine with a comprehensive list of professional skills and expertise. There are more than 45,000 standardized skills to choose from to spruce up your profile (we recently added a thousand new ones). To help you think about what skills to add, we wanted to provide an inside look at the trends we’ve seein over the past year. More specifically, which skills and industries have been climbing the ranks, and which are rising to the top globally?

In our world of smartphones, smartwatches, and even smarthomes, it is only natural to assume that technical skills would be the the fastest growing area of expertise. Our analysis of the top skills, however, revealed a surprising trend: non-IT skills are on the rise on LinkedIn. The data shows that skills related to health care, administration, hospitality, retail, and education are seeing the most significant growth. In fact, eight of the 10 skills that have grown the most in popularity ranking over the past year are non-technical and nearly half of these are healthcare related.

The growth of non-IT skills is trending worldwide. Health care is a top growing industry in France, Canada, and Italy. Construction and Architecture are on the rise in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, and Turkey. And Retail and Manufacturing are the clear front-runners in China.

Now why are these revelations valuable for you? They highlight the fact that no matter your industry, your counterparts are upping the competitive ante by adding skills to their profiles to showcase their full expertise. In the past year, LinkedIn members have added more than 380 million skills to their profiles and we don’t want you to get left behind in showcasing your best professional brand. Instead, use skills to glean competitive intel from the profiles of your peers. Are there skills you can add to differentiate yourself or are there areas of expertise you’re seeing that inspire you to learn something new?

To help give you some inspiration, we’ve pulled together a fun breakdown of the top skills over the past year and where exactly they’re growing the most.

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