Quick answer: A skill or endorsement that isn’t showing is usually hidden behind LinkedIn’s “show top skills only” display limit rather than actually missing — clicking “Show all” on your profile’s Skills section reveals the rest. Less commonly, LinkedIn’s periodic skills-list cleanup removes outdated or low-relevance skills, or an endorsement from a brand-new, low-activity account gets filtered out of the visible count.
Why This Happens
- Your profile only displays a handful of “top skills” by default — everything else is collapsed under a “Show all X skills” link that’s easy to miss.
- LinkedIn periodically prompts users to remove skills it considers outdated or redundant, which can quietly shrink your list if you accepted a cleanup prompt.
- Endorsements from accounts with very little activity or no shared connection history are sometimes filtered from the visible endorsement count, though the endorsement itself may still exist in the backend.
- A profile section visibility setting can hide the Skills section from certain viewers (for example, people outside your network) without affecting how it looks to you.
How to Fix It
- Open your own profile and click “Show all skills” to confirm the skill genuinely isn’t there rather than just collapsed.
- Re-add any skill that’s missing — go to the Skills section, Add skill, and search for it again; you can also reorder skills to pin the most important ones to the visible top row.
- Ask a well-connected, active endorser to endorse the skill again if an endorsement seems to have not registered.
- Check Settings → Visibility to make sure no section-level restriction is hiding Skills from the audience you expect to see it.
Skill Assessments Are a Separate System
LinkedIn’s skill assessment badges (the “Verified” checkmarks for passing a skills quiz) are stored and displayed separately from endorsed skills. Passing an assessment won’t automatically add a matching entry to your endorsed skills list, and losing an assessment badge won’t remove the skill itself — they’re two different features that just happen to share similar names.
Skill Limits and Why Older Skills Can Disappear
LinkedIn caps the number of skills you can list on your profile, and once you’re at that cap, adding a new skill can push an older one off the visible list even though it isn’t technically deleted from your account. If a specific skill you remember adding is now missing, check whether you’re at or near the skill limit before assuming it was removed by a bug.
Endorsements From Connections Who’ve Left LinkedIn
An endorsement tied to a connection whose account has since been deactivated or deleted will often stop displaying, since the endorsement is linked to an active profile rather than stored as a standalone data point. This can make your endorsement count appear to drop over time even though you didn’t remove anything yourself, which is a normal side effect of how LinkedIn ties endorsements to live accounts rather than a fault with your profile.
Can You Control Who’s Allowed to Endorse You?
You can’t pre-approve or block specific people from endorsing a skill, but you do have after-the-fact control: you can hide any individual endorsement from displaying on your profile without removing the connection or notifying them, from the Skills section of your profile in edit mode. This is useful if an endorsement doesn’t reflect your actual experience but you’d rather not make it an awkward conversation with the connection who gave it.
Endorsements and Search Ranking Are Separate Things
It’s a common assumption that a missing endorsement will hurt how you show up in recruiter or connection searches, but the skills themselves (whether endorsed or not) are what search matching relies on most. An endorsement adds social proof for someone viewing your profile directly; it isn’t the main lever behind whether your profile surfaces in a given search.
If your skills and endorsements still look wrong after checking all of this, double-checking your profile on desktop rather than mobile can sometimes reveal display quirks that don’t show up in the app.
Revisiting your skills list every few months to remove outdated ones can also make the section feel more current overall.
FAQ
Can someone un-endorse a skill without me knowing? Yes — a connection can remove their endorsement at any time, and LinkedIn doesn’t notify you when that happens, which can make a count quietly drop.
Why do I only see 3 skills on my profile when I added more? LinkedIn shows a small set of “featured” top skills by default; the rest are visible after clicking “Show all skills.”
Does removing a skill delete its endorsements permanently? Yes — removing a skill also removes any endorsements tied to it, and re-adding the same skill later starts its endorsement count back at zero.
