by Daniel Hickey and Chris Andrews
In the second
post in this series on eCredentialing, Dan discussed how new digital
Learning Recognition Networks (LRNs) can simultaneously support the goals of
learners, educators, schools, recruiters, and admissions officers. A reader
posted a question on that post about how the endorsement practices afforded by
these new LRNs build on the existing endorsement practices, like those at
LinkedIn. Since its launch in 2002, LinkedIn has grown into the largest digital
LRN in existence. So, this is a great question.
Dan did some digging using his own network to hunt for someone with very
specific competencies, while Chris dug into the recent research and improvements
to LinkedIn Endorsements. We also peeked into the new LinkedIn Learning made possible by the
acquisition of Lynda.com.
As most readers likely know, LinkedIn Endorsements (added in 2012) makes it simple to assign skills to
peer profiles or endorse specific skills with a single click. Many also likely
know that the Recommendations feature
(added in 2006) makes it simple to ask for and give more general peer
recommendations. Undoubtedly, many
readers likely wonder about or dismiss the value of both features as meaningful
evidence of someone’s learning and potential. We certainly had some doubts and many
questions.
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| Dan’s LinkedIn Skills and Endorsements |
Our starting assumption was that the value of these features
for recognizing learning is highly contextual. This means that their value depends
on factors such as one’s professional sector, professional status, and the relative
status of endorsers and recommenders. We suspected that these features might actually
work against some job seekers (because they used them poorly or inappropriately
by overlooking or misrepresenting skills) but that they might be essential for
others in landing an interview or consulting gig. We further assumed that a
significant part of the $26B that Microsoft just paid for LinkedIn was associated
with these learning recognition features.
Readers might be unaware that LinkedIn has been investing heavily
to make endorsements and recommendations more meaningful (and therefore
valuable) to recruiters and employers. Many
readers may also be unaware that LinkedIn went beyond recognizing learning to delivering
learning when it acquired Lynda.com and its thousands of high-quality training
videos in 2015. Given that endorsements
and recommendations in any new Learning Recognition Network is likely to be
considered in light of LinkedIn, it seems worthwhile to explore those features
in LinkedIn in some detail.
Recognizing Learning
in the Context of Dan’s LinkedIn Network
Dan is not really very active on LinkedIn. Like many
academics, he keeps his profile current but has not done much networking on it,
relying far more on email, personal connections. While he writes a lot of conventional letters
of recommendation, he so far has only had one person request a LinkedIn
recommendation. He has mostly ignored Skills
and Endorsements and has sometimes endorsement prompts annoying. While he has
responded to a few endorsement prompts, he does not even remember if he
originated any of the skills on his own profile. When he started writing this
post he had 551 connections, 20 skills, and as many 30 endorsements (as shown
above). While he regularly posted updates about previous blog posts on Twitter
and Facebook, he never did so on LinkedIn.
Dan currently has a little side project developing online professional
development courses and digital badges for K12 network administrators. The project is starting to raise some
challenges for User Interface Design that
go beyond his expertise. So, Dan went to LinkedIn and entered that search term
along with Distance Learning. That
returned 3019 results. Even narrowing it
to 2nd connections (people who are connected to somebody Dan is
connected with) still returned 600 names.
Narrowing it to 1st connections (people Dan is connected to)
returns six people. One of them is Sonny
Kirkley who Dan knows because he earned his PhD in Instructional Systems
Technology at Indiana University and still lives and works in Bloomington. Sonny’s
profile is an impressive
eCredential with lots of relevant experience and education.
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| Searching for Combinations of Skills in Dan’s LinkedIn Network |
Endorsing and
Discussing Competencies in the LinkedIn Context
Clicking over to Sonny’s profile and Scrolling down revealed
that 62 people had endorsed Sonny for User Interface Design. This included three
of Dan’s 1st connections and dozens of his 2nd
connections. The LinkedIn interface
makes it simple for Dan to message any of them. Scrolling through the list of endorsers,
Dan spotted Ed Gentry, a 2nd
connection who works in the IU Center for
Research on Learning and Technology where Dan works. In a single click, Dan is looking at Ed’s
profile (which still has him listed as working at Sonny’s company, Wisdom
Tools). In one click, Dan is able to
send a message to Ed in LinkedIn to ask him about his endorsement and get even
more specific about Sonny’s competencies. The messaging app even suggests that Dan
mention his 2nd connections with Ed. Ironically, the messaging app
also gives Dan some advice about brevity that readers know he seldom heeds
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| InMessaging an Endorser |
Ed promptly wrote back with some helpful additional
information
Recommendations in
the LinkedIn Context
Scrolling to the bottom of Sonny’s profile reveals that
Sonny has six recommendations. We see that each is associated with a specific
professional role and that Sonny has given three recommendations.
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| Sonny’s Recommendation |
Of course, Dan was asked if he wanted to give Sonny a
recommendation. Affirming displays the
thoughtful interface design which allows LinkedIn to quickly add the contextual
information that adds value to the recommendation and automatically send a
message to the connection regarding the recommendation.
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| LinkedIn’s Recommendation Endorsement |
As shown, this interface makes it simple for recommenders to display (a) the role for which the
connection is being endorsed, (b) the text of the recommendation, (c) the date
of the recommendation, and (d) the relationship between the recommender and the
connection. The first recommendation on Sonny’s profile came from someone who worked
with Sonny in a similar capacity as Dan. While Dan does not know Sonny’s
colleague who made the recommendation, clicking on the colleague’s profile
revealed that he has given a modest number of recommendations (13) suggesting. So we know that the colleague does not
post blanket recommendations to all of his 500+ connection. Dan also saw the while the colleague had over
100 endorsements for the skill of Strategy,
here were few skills or endorsements for information technologies. This helps illustrate the differences in
roles between the more general recommendations and the more specific endorsements.
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| Sonny’s Recommender’s Skills and Endorsements |
All of this information is helpful for pondering the value
of the recommendations. Going back to
the point of the first
post in this series, the information around recommendations and
endorsements facilitates highly contextualized professional discourse about
competencies. Dan was able to readily “drill down” into the information as
needed. This is the kind of discourse that characterizes conventional LRNs that
were mostly analog (often over the telephone and more recently over email), regional,
and slow. But with networked digital LRNs like LinkedIn, this discourse is
digital, global, and fast. However, this begs the question, how does the speed
and efficiency of LinkedIn impact whether these recognitions are trustworthy
and trusted?
Who Values LindedIn
Endorsements and Recommendations?
As we saw in the example with Sonny, the public nature of
LinkedIn recognitions provides transparency and some assurance that the
recognitions are not bogus. LinkedIn stated in 2016
that "more than 10 billion endorsements have been shared” and “people with
at least five skills listed on their LinkedIn profile receive up to 17x more
profile views.” A widely-cited survey
by Jobvite in 2013 revealed that 96% of the professional recruiters reported
using LinkedIn to search for candidates, and that 92% of the recruiters
reported using LinkedIn to vet candidates before interviewing them.
However, the Jobvite survey said nothing about endorsements
and recommendations and the data from LinkedIn was strictly correlational (people
with more skills are likely more active on the site). A quick search of Google
uncovers posts like this one asserting that LinkedIn “trivialized” the meaning of endorsement by making it one click away. But
it turns out that the post was written by someone who calls himself the “Get
Recognition Right ® Guy” and runs the Recognition Management Institute.
It turns out that there is little scholarly empirical
research on these features. Chris’s searching Google Scholar for “LinkedIn
Endorsements” revealed plenty of articles (many from people with a stake) but
little empirical work. He did find a 2016
survey of 120 professionals about their LinkedIn endorsement titled The LinkedIn Endorsement Game. It was published in Business and Professional Communication
Quarterly and found that
…the majority of the participants
were active users of their skills section on LinkedIn, and they had endorsed
others at least once. The most common scenario behind endorsement was that the
person knew about the endorsee’s skills through his or her personal experience.
The second most common scenario was that LinkedIn prompts were the reason
behind someone endorsing others, especially when they did it as a reply to a
previous endorsement of themselves (Rapanta
& Cantoni,, 2016, p. 4).
The authors concluded that
The majority of people make and
receive endorsements without carefully calculating the epistemic weight of
knowledge authority attribution that lies behind the phenomenon of attributing
a particular skill to someone.
In short, they concluded that the way LinkedIn prompts users
to endorse skills and the reciprocal nature of endorsements appears to
undermine the authority of those endorsements.
Our search did not
find a lot of evidence supporting our initial assumption that the value of
LinkedIn endorsements is highly contextual. One blog post asking Are
LinkedIn Endorsements Simply Overrated? was generally dismissive and
suggested instead focusing on improving resumes. But it did state that endorsements “can add
value to a profile only when the right people promote a person’s skill set.”
One executive quoted in the article stated that
If you are endorsed for a skill by
someone you worked with who has also been endorsed for that skill by multiple
qualified people it counts for a lot more. The rest is just static in the system.
This distinction is crucial and LinkedIn appears keenly
aware.
Efforts by LinkedIn
to Enhance Endorsements
As mentioned above, LinkedIn has been tweaking their
recognition features in order to increase their value to recruiters. One of
these tweaks in LinkedIn Recruiter is
the ability
to filter by skills and number of endorsements. This means that people with
more endorsements for a particular skill will appear higher up in the results
when searching for a particular skill. Similarly, LinkedIn now highlights
skills on a profile that have been endorsed by others who are considered
skilled and skills that have been endorsed by 1st connections. But
LinkedIn is not only focusing on recruiters. An October 2016 post
that was aimed at individuals stated that the company was “rethinking” endorsements:
Delivering endorsements that provide even more value required
a blend of research, new machine learning models and re-architecting the
backend infrastructure that both serves and recommends new endorsements. These
changes to Skills and Endorsements means we can better surface the most
relevant endorsements that help validate your skills.
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| More Focused Request for Skill Endorsment |
On one hand this sort of prompting may still diminish the value of endorsements. On the other hand, this should serve to increase the number of valued endorsements from close connections who are also strongly endorsed for the skill. Combined with the new Recruiter tools that order search results accordingly, this promises a Google-style search engine based on recognition of learning. Writers posting recently at Forbes, The Business Journals, and Venture Beat seem convinced that these refinements will increase the value of endorsements.
Introducing LinkedIn Learning
LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com and their thousands of high quality training
videos and courses in 2015. Those
resources now reside in In Learning
which was introduced in September 2016. As
we will explore in more our next post, these developments expand LinkedIn from
recognizing learning to directly supporting it. In Learning organizes videos
into courses, and courses into “Learning Paths.” Given that the Lynda.com
course completion certificates now go directly to a profile page, these
developments promise to dramatically increase LinkedIn’s usefulness and use as
a learning recognition network.
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| LinkedIn's Learning Paths for Instructional Design |
Consider for
example, the Learning Path for becoming an online instructor. While the Pathway includes 32 hours of
video. Those videos are segmented into
assignments and separated by online quizzes.
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| LinkedIn's Beginning Online Instructor Learning Path |
Conclusions on LinkedIn as an LRN
These are certainly
exciting developments for education and training. They raise all kinds of challenges and questions about the things that we explore here at RMA. While it will take some time to see whether
these two important strands of development at LinkedIn go. As other more
specialized LRNs come on line (particularly MyMantl from Chalk and Wire), LinkedIn will look for additional ways to
compete.
Dan and Chris will
stay on the sidelines and cheer on all of these efforts. But while working on this post, Dan went
ahead and endorsed the skills of a number of connections and accepted over 50
unaccepted connection requests. He also posted a LinkedIn update to promote the previous RMA blog post. Doing so quickly generated six likes in a day
and at least hundred new views of the blog. That was promising.
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