14 min read
LinkedIn Skills Assessment: Worth It Until 2023, Gone Since 2024
No. There is nothing left to sit. The retirement notice in LinkedIn’s help center says skill assessments are no longer offered, and that badges and “all data associated with assessments and badges” were removed from member profiles in 2024.
That leaves two questions: was the badge ever worth having, and what should you do instead? The dates make both clearer.
- March 2019. LinkedIn opens skill assessments in beta.
- September 2019. LinkedIn’s launch post claims test takers are 30% more likely to get hired.
- Late 2023. LinkedIn winds the tests down. Archived copies of its help center still describe live tests on November 22, 2023, and show the retirement notice in place by January 17, 2024.
- During 2024. Badges come off profiles and the underlying data is deleted. LinkedIn’s notice names the year only, not a month.
- Today. The help center lists the feature as retired. Nothing scored has replaced it.
Some pages still date the shutdown to 2025, and a few still tell you how to take the test. Trust LinkedIn’s help center on its own product. It is the one source that has to be current.
Are LinkedIn skill assessments worth it to anyone? Takers, not readers
Looking back, whether they paid off depends on which side of the profile you sat. For the person taking one, it was a cheap bet. It cost nothing, took under half an hour, and a bad score stayed private. The worst case was a lost lunch break.
For the recruiter reading the profile, it was thin. The test checked whether you could recall facts about a tool under a clock. It could not show whether you had used that tool to finish work, and that is what a hiring manager is paying for. The badge was a modest signal at best, and the hirers LinkedIn heard from preferred examples of applied work. If you collected a few, you did nothing wrong. You just got less than the marketing promised.
Whether LinkedIn will bring skill assessments back
Nothing suggests it. LinkedIn has announced no return, and the way it shut the feature down points the other way. A company that plans to revive something keeps the data. LinkedIn deleted it. Its stated reason, covered below, is also a reason to stay away from quizzes, since hirers told it they wanted to see how people had used a skill.
The LinkedIn Skills Assessment in 60 Seconds
You only need the mechanics to follow the verdict, so here they are, short. For the full history, our earlier piece on what the LinkedIn skills assessment proved and where it stopped goes deeper.
Each test covered one tool or subject, such as Excel, JavaScript, or Photoshop. According to LinkedIn’s help documentation on the tests, a typical one had 15 multiple-choice questions, timed, finished in a single sitting. Score in the top 30% against LinkedIn’s benchmark and you earned a badge you could choose to show. Score lower and recruiters never saw the result.
Fifteen timed recall questions, a top-30% cutoff, and hidden failures made the badge easy to earn and hard to read. That design explains most of what the badge was worth.
- Cost. Free on every account, no Premium needed. The real price was about twenty minutes a test plus study time. Prep courses and practice banks sold well, which tells you the test rewarded recall you could cram.
- Retakes. Miss the badge and you got one more try within six months. Delete a result and that test stayed locked for six months. That lockout changed over time: LinkedIn’s help page said three months until 2023, then six.
- What is left. No scored test of any kind. You now have four signals nobody checks: the skills you list, endorsements, entries in Licenses & certifications, and LinkedIn Learning certificates of completion.
To Recruiters, the LinkedIn Badge Was a Recall Score, Not Proof of Work
A LinkedIn skill assessment badge answered one narrow question. Could this person answer fifteen questions about a tool, on a timer, better than most people who tried? That is a true fact about someone. It is also a long way from “can this person do the job.” So was a LinkedIn skills assessment worth it to the people doing the hiring? Mostly not, for the reasons below.
Even its fans saw the badge as a screening shortcut. Robert Pruitt, a recruiter at Teema Group, wrote in 2021: “When I show a client a completed Skills Quiz, that in many cases client will forgo their internal tests.” That is the strongest case for the badge: it saved one screening step. It never showed what the candidate had built.
The 30% more likely to get hired figure, checked
Badge holders were 30% more likely to get hired, or so the number goes. It came from LinkedIn’s September 2019 launch post, which reads, “Early results show candidates who take Skill Assessments are 30% more likely to get hired.” Read it slowly and three problems show up.
- It was LinkedIn grading its own feature. The post gave no method, no sample, and no comparison group. That makes it marketing.
- It says take, not pass. The claim covers everyone who sat a test, badge or not. So it can’t tell you what the badge itself did.
- The takers were already different. People who bother with an optional test are usually the ones job hunting hard right now. They would get hired more often anyway. Runners who buy new shoes finish more races, but the shoes are not why.
The 30% figure shows who took the tests, not what the badge did for them. It is weak evidence that the badge moved any hiring decision at all.
LinkedIn’s stated reason for retiring the skills assessment
LinkedIn explained the shutdown in one sentence: “We’ve heard from hirers that examples of how a candidate applied their skills is increasingly valuable to assess fit.” The people the badge was built for told LinkedIn they would rather see what you did with a skill. When the people a badge is meant to impress ask for something else, the badge is finished. Is a LinkedIn skills assessment worth it once its own maker says that? No.
Why a gameable skills assessment loses recruiter trust
The format made gaming easy. Multiple-choice questions with one right answer can be written down and shared, and they were. Full answer sets sat openly on GitHub, in one public repository covering dozens of tests, and a search for any test plus “answers” found them. Add unlimited subjects, a private failure, and a badge that only showed when the news was good, and you get a mark that anyone patient could collect.
Once recruiters knew that, every badge got discounted, including the honest ones. The person who studied hard and the person who searched for the key looked exactly the same on the profile.
If You Earned a LinkedIn Skills Assessment Badge: What to Do With It Now
Maybe the LinkedIn skills assessment was worth it to you back then. Either way, it is already gone from your profile. The skill it stood for is not. The job now is to stop pointing at the badge and start pointing at the skill.
Start by finding where the badge still lives. Check your resume, any saved PDF of your profile, a personal website, an email signature, and old cover letter templates. A credential nobody can verify is a line you may have to defend in an interview, so take it out. A recruiter who looks it up finds nothing, and you never want the first question in a call to be about something that no longer exists.
Resume rewrites: take the badge line out, put the proof line in
The fix for a LinkedIn skill assessment badge on a resume is one swap. Replace the badge with a sentence about work you did using that skill, ideally with a result someone could ask about. The examples below are templates. Put in your own numbers.
| Old resume line | Rewrite that proves the skill |
|---|---|
| LinkedIn Skill Assessment: Excel (top 30%) | Built the Excel model the team uses to close the month, cutting close from five days to three |
| LinkedIn Skill Assessment: Python | Wrote a Python script that pulls weekly sales data and replaced four hours of manual reporting |
| LinkedIn Skill Assessment: Google Ads | Ran search campaigns on a monthly budget and lowered cost per lead over two quarters |
Each rewrite answers the question the badge never could: what happened when you used it? If you are also changing fields, our career change resume guide shows how to lead with skills that carry over.
Where can I see my skills on LinkedIn now that badges are gone?
In the Skills section of your profile, each with whatever endorsements people have clicked. When you add or edit a skill, LinkedIn lets you link it to a job, a school, or a certification on your profile. Do that. A skill linked to the role where you used it reads very differently from a bare word in a list.
Two practical notes. LinkedIn caps the Skills section at 100, so trim the ones you would not want to be asked about. And pin the handful that match the jobs you want, since those are what a recruiter sees first.
What Is Worth Your Time Now That LinkedIn Skills Assessments Are Gone
Building a portfolio, getting certified and collecting endorsements differ a lot in cost and in weight. The table ranks what to do instead of a LinkedIn skills assessment by how much a recruiter can trust it, what it costs you, and how long it takes.
| Option | How a recruiter weighs it | Cost | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| A work sample a stranger can open | Strongest. They can look at it and ask about it | Free to low | A weekend or two per piece |
| Skills linked to past jobs and projects on your profile | Strong in context. The job does the vouching | Free | One evening |
| A third-party certification employers can look up | Solid, mainly in fields that ask for it by name | Exam fees vary, often hundreds of dollars | Weeks to months |
| LinkedIn Learning certificate of completion | Light. Shows you finished a course | Paid subscription, or through an employer | A few hours per course |
| Endorsements from connections | Weakest. Often traded, never checked | Free | Minutes |
Why do work samples sit at the top? Hiring research has long found that asking people to do a slice of the job is one of the better ways to judge them. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s guide to work samples and simulations notes that performance on them “relates highly to performance on the job,” and that applicants see them as fair. A sample you built yourself is the portable version of that.
The trend helps you, too. Employers have been dropping degree requirements and screening more on skills, as Harvard and Burning Glass researchers reported in Harvard Business Review. When a skill is the thing being judged, proof of the skill matters more.
Do these two first. Spend one evening linking your top skills to the jobs where you used them. Then pick the skill that shows up most in the postings you want, and build one small, finished piece of work that uses it. One work sample a recruiter can open outweighs a page of endorsements.
When LinkedIn certifications are worth it
People asking whether LinkedIn certifications are worth it usually mean LinkedIn Learning certificates. Those are certificates of completion. LinkedIn’s help page on adding them says you can’t add one to your profile until you have watched every video in the course. So the certificate proves you finished. It does not prove you can do the thing.
That still makes them worth it in two cases. One, the course taught you a skill you needed, and the learning was the point. Two, you are new to a field and want to show you are serious, as long as you pair it with something you built afterwards. As proof on its own, a stack of completion certificates is wallpaper. For heavier credentials that change hiring outcomes, see our guide to career change certifications.
What is the difference between a certification and an assessment? Who stands behind it
A certification comes from an outside body that puts its own name on your result. It usually involves a longer, often supervised exam, renewal dates, and a way for an employer to look you up. An assessment is a measurement taken at one moment, and what it is worth depends on who reads it and why.
The LinkedIn badge was an assessment dressed up to look like a certification. It sat in the same place on your profile, but nobody outside LinkedIn stood behind it, and now nobody can check it at all.
The best 5 skills for LinkedIn are in the job ad
There is no universal best five. The right five are the ones that keep showing up in the jobs you want. Pull five postings for your target role, write down every skill each one names, and count. The top five are your list. A marketing analyst might land on SQL, Google Analytics, A/B testing, Excel, and reporting to leadership. A nurse moving into health tech would get a very different five.
Put those five at the top of your Skills section, link each to a job, and make sure at least one has a work sample behind it. If you cannot tell how deep your skill goes, our guide to judging your technical skill level helps you rate yourself without rounding up.
When a Skills Assessment Is Worth It: The Test That Measures Something Real
A skills assessment is worth taking when it tells you something you don’t already know. Was a LinkedIn skills assessment worth it for your own learning? Only through the studying it pushed you into. If you use Excel every day, a badge told you nothing new, and it told a recruiter very little.
It helps to split two jobs that often get blurred together. One is proving a skill to a stranger. Work samples and recognized certifications do that. The other comes earlier: working out which of your skills you want to build the next years around.
That second job matters most for anyone asking whether a skills assessment is worth it for a career change. Being good at something and wanting a job made of it are not the same. Plenty of people are excellent at spreadsheets and quietly worn out by a week full of them. Skill shows you can build the model. It says nothing about whether the fifth straight week of models leaves you with anything for Friday night.
The Pigment career test starts from that earlier question. Its questions are forced-choice: each one makes you pick between two things you could claim, with no right answer to look up. It sets what sustains you at work beside what you’re good at, so the strengths you choose to prove are ones you would want to keep using. It is for your own decision, and it never goes on a resume. One thing to weigh: it rests on established research about person and job fit. Whether its own results predict how satisfied people end up in a role is a claim only a published study of the test could back, and that study has not been done yet.
How to take a skill assessment on LinkedIn today: you can’t, so take this instead
Match the test to the goal. If you want a recruiter to believe a skill, take a recognized certification exam in your field or build a work sample. If you want to check your own level, a structured skills self-assessment costs nothing and tends to be franker than any badge, because the only reader is you. If the open question is which way to point your career, use a career test that looks past skill to fit.
Two questions to ask any test before you spend an evening on it
Before you spend time on any assessment, ask it two questions.
- Could someone post the answers online? If a test has one correct answer per question, a key can exist, and it will spread. Tests that ask you to rank options that are all reasonable leave nothing to look up.
- Could the result surprise you? If it only repeats your resume back to you, skip it. A useful result names something you half knew and never put into words, or something you didn’t know at all.
The LinkedIn badge failed both.
Before you pay for any test: check who reads the result. If it is a recruiter, it has to be checkable by a stranger. If it is you, it has to tell you something your resume can’t.
LinkedIn Skills Assessment Worth It: Five Loose Ends for Badge Holders
If you earned badges before 2024, these are the questions still hanging. Keep the skill, drop the badge, and replace it with proof a stranger can check.
“My old resume PDF still shows a LinkedIn badge. Does it matter?”
Yes, a little. A recruiter who looks it up finds nothing, because LinkedIn removed the badges and deleted the data behind them in 2024. Swap the line for one sentence about work you did with that skill, with a number in it. That reads stronger and cannot go stale.
“Did the 30% figure mean that passing got people hired?”
No. LinkedIn's 2019 post said candidates who took the tests were about 30% more likely to get hired. It said take, not pass, and it came from LinkedIn's own early data with no method published. People actively job hunting were the ones taking tests, so the gap proves little.
“Is a LinkedIn Learning certificate the new badge?”
Not really. A LinkedIn Learning certificate shows you finished a course; LinkedIn only lets you add it once every video is watched. That is useful if the course taught you something. As proof of skill it is light, so pair it with a small piece of work you built afterwards.
“Can a recruiter still check a badge I earned in 2022?”
No. LinkedIn deleted all assessment and badge data in 2024, so nothing exists to check against. If you list it anyway, the most a recruiter can do is take your word for it. Keep the skill on your profile and tie it to the role you used it in.
“Is a career test a replacement for a skills badge?”
No, and it should not try to be. A badge was meant for a recruiter. A good career test is meant for you: it helps you see which strengths you want to build on before you spend weekends proving them. Use it first, then build proof for what it points to.
