Have you noticed some of the new changes on LinkedIn lately? One of the new features that is currently in beta is the “Skills and Expertise Area“.

I just found this late last week and I have to say I’m really impressed thus far. Here is a screenshot below, if you haven’t seen the new feature yet. In the screenshot, I have “Video Editing” as a skill. This is something that I currently do for our lacrosse team and want to learn more about. It is a great way to find groups related to a particular skill, as well finding people and companies that do this skill set. On the right side, there is a section titled “Video Editing Jobs”. Can you imagine the benefit to not only job seekers, but people that are looking for a new career and of course, college students looking for their first job? The possibilities are endless!

LinkedIn New Skill And Expertise area

On the top right of the page, it also has the “Relative Growth” of that skill and expertise. This way you can see if your skills are hot or not. As Dickie V. says “Awesome baby!”

If you have checked out this new feature, what do you think about it? As you can tell, I love it. Think about the possibilities for people looking for a job, searching out a new career, college graduates and the list goes on.

Recently LinkedIn made some updates to their website. If you have visited the site you may have noticed changes with the groups page and various other areas. A bigger change is the functionality with Twitter. Now you can add your Twitter account and then all of your twitter updates will show up on your Linked status.

Now, this can be good and/or bad. I know many of you tweet throughout the day, with information you probably do not want to show your LinkedIn connections. Luckily there is an option to include with your tweets that will help with that. If you select the option in LinkedIn to only show tweets (in your status) with the tag #in, then they will only show there. For me this is great because I do not want to post all of my tweets on LinkedIN and I am sure my connections don’t want to read them all.

As far as the new group features, here is a full description of what has changed.

For me, I am still getting used to the new group features. I do like a few of them and some of the add-in features. Seeing new discussions right from the main groups page is very nice. Being in 50 groups, I can now see easily what new discussions are in each group. Very nice! All actions are much easier to get to as well.

What do you think of the new features in LinkedIn? Do you like or no? Tell us what you think of the new features. And no, I don’t work for LinkedIN