Last week I visited my moribund profile on LinkedIn to find at the top of the page a message that said: “Your connections Dominic, Louise and Clive have endorsed you for new skills and expertise.”
The three of them evidently think I’m pretty talented, which is nice to know. Variously they attest to my possessing seven skills: newspaper; magazines; journalism; copy editing; business journalism; editorial and newspapers.
This would be flattering were it not for two things. The first is that I’ve never heard of any of them, let alone worked with them. The second is that half the things they cite aren’t skills. Newspaper – either in the singular or plural – most certainly is not a skill: it is a dying product. Copy editing is a skill but, alas, it is one I don’t have.