LinkedIn Peer Rated Skills Are a Useful Proxy for Success

I am planning to conduct an integration workshop for a few of my pre-sales colleagues so that they can tell the integration story to customers, prospects and partners. When I wanted to get a clear idea about their skills and backgrounds, I went to LinkedIn rather than going to an internal source because there is no reliable internal source of information for skills and competencies of an employee. I suspect that is the case in almost all organizations in the world.

I found out that LinkedIn skills provide a reasonably accurate picture of a person's skills. I looked at the top 5 skills (based on peer ratings) of all the colleagues planning to participate in the training and created a word cloud of their skills. Enterprise Software was on the top followed by Pre-Sales and then interestingly enough - business intelligence. That is because many of the successful enterprise architects at SAP came from Business Objects and have the skill to explain complex concepts in an easy to understand manner. This is eye opening to me. It looks like colleagues with Business Intelligence backgrounds may be able to explain cloud to on-premise integration better than those with a human resource technology background. The fourth skill is SaaS followed by SAP.

I also looked at their previous organizations. I found out that If they have worked at SAP, an SAP customer or another large enterprise software vendor, their chances of succeeding in the role we are planning for them is high. If they came from a very small software vendor with a narrow area of expertise, they may find it difficult to succeed in this role.