When creating a profile on LinkedIn there are three places where you can enter your education.  “Adding” a “certificate” to your profile is too easy.  This dilutes education and how it is categorized.  The way LinkedIn has integrated Lynda.com is the cause. And if they have integrated these “certificates” into the searches done by recruiters it will only get worse.

With your profile, you have three locations to enter education:

• Education – you can enter the school, degree and year earned.
• Licenses & Certifications – you can enter the name of that certificate, the issuing organization, when it was issued and when it expires.
• Courses – which is a subsection of “Accomplishments”.

Simple “courses” at LinkedIn Learning are entered as “Certificates” once completed and “shared” in your profile.

A 50 minute video course that may or may not have quizzes hardly qualifies as a License or a Certificate. Certificates are items like the Cisco Certified Networking Professional (CCNP). These take serious knowledge and skill to earn.

Wrong Place

“Courses” is also not the correct location. For example, The Analytics Edge, one of the first edX courses I completed, has a level of effort (LOE) of 13 weeks at 10 to 15 hours per week. At 12.5 hours per week average that is more than 162 hours. We did hands-on analysis of real datasets that were used in Moneyball and The Framingham Heart Study.

Should that be equitable to The Essential Elements of Predictive Analytics and Data Mining on LinkedIn Learning at less than an hour and a half? A Recruiter doing a search might hit on the same keywords. But one course is a month of full time work, and another is a long lunch. And if I did a video a day during lunch for two weeks I’d have ten times the keywords and entries in my profile.

The Courses section also is not a proper location. My CS 340 Computer Security was a full semester course with homework, exams and required reading. If you search for “Computer Security” on LinkedIn Learning, you’ll find 250 courses that range from 1.5 to 5 hours each. Both carry the same weight to a search for phrases. But LinkedIn does not track the level of effort.

My Experiences

Myself, I’ve been using LinkedIn as an alternative to the news during my lunch breaks. In the past month and a half I’ve completed more than 50 “certificates”. Each averaged 50 minutes. A simple click would add them to my profile, possibly increasing “hits” on searches by recruiters. It also might make me look like more of an expert if I were working as a consultant. I am working on a better way to share the details of the simple courses I’ve taken, but right now LinkedIn doesn’t have a proper way to share them. We need to be able to properly convey the level of effort involved.

What is the best way you’ve found to share these efforts and minor experiences?