First and foremost, we would like to extend our sincere gratitude to all who participated in the survey. With the help of you guys, we can strive to make Indorse a great product for everyone!

The objective of this survey was to understand how our community perceives and uses the LinkedIn skill endorsements feature. These insights would not only allow us to identify our initial target audience but also aim for solutions to the right user pain points.

The majority of the participants have less than 5 years or 5–10 years of professional experience, the numbers are not far off from each other and should provide a rather balanced survey result.

This shows the type of LinkedIn users the participants are, it can be determined that the majority of participants prefer to use LinkedIn for free rather than pay for the premium features; in fact there were more respondents who do not use LinkedIn as compared to the number of participants who hold a premium account.

While the majority of the participants have indicated that they use LinkedIn, it seems that there are some who are unfamiliar with the Skills & Endorsement Section.

This could perhaps be attributed to the fact that a significant portion of users are just beginning their career and focused on building a network. They may have neither enough skills nor sufficient endorsers.

Considering the average of this bar chart, participants seem to have a neutral stance towards the effectiveness of LinkedIn’s Endorsement Section.

The relative ease with which anyone can get endorsed for a skill might explain the largely neutral stance on how endorsements are perceived. Since LinkedIn endorsements are to be taken at face value, it’s understandable that people only consider them to be indicative of someone’s skill but not a validation.

Participants who rated lowly have justified their rating by stating that they are not confident that the Endorsement Section is reliable without proper verification or checks.

As a vast majority of users have less than 10 years of professional experience, it is understandable that many of the participants have less than 10 skills endorsed.

Many participants have indicated that less than a third of their endorsers are people they have directly worked with.

Surprisingly, people are able to identify themselves with the top skills they are being endorsed for. Despite the fact that almost half of them haven’t directly worked with the endorser.

Endorsements again lean towards being indicative and not qualitative.

Results are about the same for both evaluating of other user’s profile and having endorsements on their own profile. This would indicate that there is indeed value in getting endorsements for skills. The challenge is in exploring novel endorsement mechanisms that can dramatically increase the perceived confidence in them. Endorsements will be truly successful when they can directly be used as a reliable filter when evaluating people based on their skills.

On whether the participants trust endorsed skills when evaluating another’s profile, it would seem that majority believe in it to a certain extent, however there aren’t many who have complete trust towards it.

While participants have claimed that they have not worked with majority of the people who have endorsed them, participants stated that they primarily endorse colleagues.

This chart shows that participants value endorsements more from people they have worked with, which could be attributed to the fact that anyone is able to endorse everyone, therefore endorsements are more valuable when performed by the individual you have worked with.

Indorse intends to solve this by having proof checks, this way, endorsed skills are factual, credible and more valuable.

In this chart, we have been provided with a better understanding as to the forms of endorsements that are more widely used. This could aid in our decision to include certain features.

From this chart, we can see that many of the participants are in the IT industry.

Participants have indicated that getting expert evaluation and endorsement would improve career prospects and that most of them would very much like to get endorsements by industry experts.

Many participants have justified answering ‘yes’ by stating that getting evaluated by industry experts would make their skills seem more valuable and credible.

On whether the participants were willing to pay a small fee for skill evaluation and endorsement by industry experts, 18.4% have answered no, 46.5% answered maybe, 27.2% have answered yes and 7.9% were indifferent.

This suggests that the participants values skill evaluation and endorsements enough to consider paying a small fee.

This concludes the results and research findings of the survey. It has given us some fantastic insights and info that will help Indorse make decisions on the features that should or should not be included. We would like to once again thank all the participants of this survey.