Endorsing Design Twitter
Design Twitter strikes again…and as always, it ain’t pretty.

Disclaimer af: I’m just a junior designer. I have very little experience as is, and I’m not familiar with the ins and outs of Linkedin’s endorsement system. I am simply expressing my thoughts, which try to look at both sides of the argument and I’m open to discussion~
So I personally don’t try to get myself too involved when Design Twitter blows up. I’m very much a fly on the wall; I shy from conflict, I voice my opinions only when necessary (and only when I am confident in my answer), and I pretty much wanna be on everyone’s good side…
*cough* kiss-ass *cough*
But yesterday there was a whole falling out with a Facebook post, and I wanted to address this whole thing from my own perspective. Not gonna summarize what it was (for the sake of misinterpretation), so I’ll let the post speak for itself:

You get endorsements, you get endorsements, you g-
I was able to participate in this activity and in doing so, I ended up endorsing a number of people and was able to actually connect with some alumni 🙌🏼. When I started on this design path, I really thought it was important to have a good Linkedin profile. I mean, how else would one showcase themselves right? Sarcasm aside, I remember always wishing someone could endorse me for one of my skills. Maybe then, I thought to myself, a recruiter could better notice me and I could have the opportunity to get something!
Since then, I’ve stopped really caring because I found it more important to just network and build connections that way. Whether or not that’s cold emailing for coffee, working on my own side projects, or simply being more involved, I realized that those are what get your foot in the door. More so than some endorsement. An endorsement, mind you, that could be very much subjective. How familiar do you have to be with the skill before it’s considering “endorsement-worthy?” No idea.
However, this post came up and I thought to myself, “well this sounds like a good idea to help bring awareness to people in the industry!” I don’t think endorsements themselves are particularly necessary, but I think for some people it can definitely bring benefit because it’s *some* form of recognition. I personally tried to go through every person’s profile and endorse only the relevant skills they listed that went in line with their listed experiences. It was a little more tedious, but if you’re going to — in a very literal sense — blindly endorse someone for their skills the least you could do is make sure you’re doing the best you can to highlight the ones that pertain to the person’s design career. I’ll endorse you for “User Experience Design” and “User Research” but I’m pretty sure you’ll be okay if I skip “Spanish” or “Hardware Engineering.”

Endorsements do nothing for you, but also…don’t do them?
Here’s where it got a little sticky: the person who initially posted (who also happened to be a moderator) began receiving criticism for what was being done and in response, those criticims lead to either deleted comments or insofar as a ban from the group. Do I think some of those actions were a little hasty? Perhaps. I don’t know enough about the banter to make a judgment call. Do I also think the intentions of the post were aiming to be good and these criticisms — having been made public on the thread — made would-be participants hesistant/afraid of backlash? Very much so.

Linkedin endorsements aren’t that helpful. I get it. And I’m sure a lot of people already do as well. They don’t speak of one’s ability to produce good work/demonstrate good character nearly as well as say…one’s projects or experiences. But if we’re all working towards being designers, shouldn’t any design-related skill deserve an endorsement (assuming their listed experience details use of these particular skills)?
More importantly, I don’t understand why people had to raise pitchforks for this. Obviously it was up to the people involved whether or not they followed through on endorsing their peers. No one was forcing anyone to do anything.

All the members in the group joined the group because they were trying to better themselves as designers and not (at least I hope) take advantage of other people for the sake of their own career paths. The people that were against it believed that Linkedin endorsements do nothing to one’s ability to land a job. And those people could very well be right. So…why even bother complaining? Let those who wanted to participate do just that, participate. Like me, maybe they’ll come out the other side with a handful of actual, meaningful connections (shoutout to the few UCSD alumni I connected with) 😇.

Again, those who were against it are probably right. Endorsements don’t mean anything. They’re this subjective metric of one’s skill levels…but I want to say that a person rocking 10+ endorsements from fellow designers in the community look a lot better than a person with none. Silly? Quite
I’m not saying that projects and connecting outside of Linkedin isn’t important. But if we’re keeping this within the scope of Linkedin, then I think there is something to be said about how “helpful” an endorsement may be.
Final thoughts
We’re all just trying to be better and reach our goals. I think there will always be people who take advantage of the system, as with any other thing in society. But based on what I saw/read, this little activity ended up benefitting a good number of people. It brought the community closer together and although the initial act of “mass-endorsing” might not have had a huge impact on one’s career or chances of landing a job, it gave designers a chance to actually dive deep into connecting with others and providing constructive feedback once the dust settled.
I think about it this way: just keep your head down and focus on improving yourself. Criticizing others isn’t going to solve anything. In those situations where you believe _____ isn’t going to help designers, particularly young designers in learning what’s “right” and “wrong,” it should be in your best interest to raise awareness and have these discussions instead. 👶🏼
