Facebook gets a dash of LinkedIn with ‘professional skills’ update

Facebook has added a new feature that allows you to add your professional skills to your profile.

The feature, first noticed by Sociobits, mirrors similar features in LinkedIn and is fairly easy to get started with.

All you have to do is go to the about section of your profile and fill in the “professional skills” field, which appears at the bottom of “work and education”.

The move, which a Facebook spokesperson told The Next Web the team is “currently testing”, is pretty interesting. In part, this is because it allows your profile to act as kind of online CV, something that’s been the preserve of LinkedIn until now. But there’s also something to be said for the way Facebook is going about it.

Rather than just allowing you to list your skills, the social network actually uses the feature to connect you to interest groups and communities. The benefit of this is that it could potentially help people other than your friends or friends of friends find you.

It also means that it’ll be easier for someone using Graph Search to find and connect with you.

It’s hardly surprising that Facebook is moving in on LinkedIn’s turf. The professional social network has been one of the steadiest post-IPO and continues to report solid financial results. That’s in direct contrast to the roller-coaster ride Facebook’s had since going public.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that LinkedIn hasn’t exactly been averse to borrowing features from Facebook. Its various face lifts have made profiles easier to navigate, in part because they share similarities with the ones people are used to on Facebook and what are endorsements if not its own form of “likes”.

While the feature us potentially very useful, it remains to be seen whether or not Facebook has a realistic chance of claiming a stake in the professional social networking space. After all there have been job apps like BranchOut on the social network before and they hardly turned out to be threats to LinkedIn.