Which intranet related skills and technologies are the most popular?

by Andrew Wright

LinkedIn have recently added a new skills feature (still in beta). This feature allows you to add skills to your LinkedIn profile and your LinkedIn connections can then endorse these skills.

It also enables LinkedIn in to track which skills are the most popular.

I thought it might be interesting to use this feature to track how widespread the various intranet related skills and technologies are in the workplace.

The table below lists intranet related skills and technologies, the relative growth of these skills, the number of people who have listed these skills and the most popular LinkedIn group for each skill. 

Popular intranet related skills	Growth	Size ('000)	Biggest LI Group	# mbrs	% mbrs
* Social Media	38%	2,400	Social Media Marketing	510,212	21.3%
** Change Management	1%	1,900	Organizational Change Practitioners	33,448	1.8%
Organisational Development	1%	496	Organization Development Network, OD Network, ODN	24,342	4.9%
Portals	-2%	348	The Enterprise Architecture Network	86,610	24.9%
Corporate Communications	-1%	346	Corporate Communications Executive Network	24,011	6.9%
Internal Communications	-2%	313	Corporate Communication	37,974	12.1%
Intranet	-10%	308	Worldwide Intranet Challenge	11,612	3.8%
Employee Engagement	4%	254	Employee Communications and Engagement	16,230	6.4%
Content Management	0%	177	Content Management Professionals	23,947	13.5%
Web 2.0	-7%	140	Web 2.0	30,239	21.6%
Knowledge Management	-3%	134	Knowledge Management	7,042	5.3%
Business Process Design	0%	111	Business Process Improvement	48,324	43.5%
Web Content Management	2%	70	Web Content Management Systems	6,521	9.3%
Collaboration Tools	0%	7	Enterprise 2.0 Group	4,483	64.0%
Enterprise 2.0	1%	4	Enterprise 2.0 Group	4,483	112.1%
Intranet Strategy	-9%	4	Intranet Professionals	4,966	124.2%
Digital Workplace	n/a		Digital Workplace Forum	46
Technology	Growth	Size ('000)	Biggest LI Group	# mbrs	% mbrs
SharePoint	5%	376	SharePoint Users Group	43,018	11.4%
Joomla	11%	107	Official Joomla! Users Group	11,364	10.6%
Websphere	-8%	90	IBM WebSphere Enthusiasts	15,377	17.1%
Drupal	19%	81	Drupal	26,165	32.3%
Lotus	-11%	33	Lotus Professionals	12,887	39.1%
SAP Portal	-7%	16	SAP Netweaver Portal Consultants	2,450	15.3%
Confluence	8%	10	Confluence Users	1,500	15.0%
Liferay	20%	9	Liferay Developer Group	4,597	51.1%
Vignette	-15%	6	Vignette Expert	1,202	20.0%
Sitecore	20%	6	Sitecore	3,892	64.9%
Plone	-10%	2	Plone	1,187	59.4%
Yammer	36%	1.7	Yammer Fans	930	54.7%

* Social Media is the 47th most popular skill overall
** Change Management is the 92nd overall popular skill

Comments

I found it interesting that 308,000 people have identified 'Intranet' as a skill and yet only a small percentage of these belong to an intranet related LinkedIn Group (in comparison to other skills). This is even stranger given that 376,000 people have listed Sharepoint as a skill - roughly the same number as intranets more or less - and yet there are seven SharePoint groups with at least 10,000 members, with the largest group having 43,000 members.

Why is this the case? Perhaps the power of Microsoft marketing? Or perhaps intranets just aren't as interesting as SharePoint.... any ideas?

It's also surprising that the term Digital Workplace is not yet categorised as a skill by LinkedIn. This is a term that has been getting some airplay recently in an effort to broaden the scope of the services that an intranet can deliver. In fact, an intranet is usually described as a sub-category of the Digital Workplace.

Perhaps the fact that it is not yet listed as a skill indicates that there is a bit of work to do yet before the term Digital Workplace becomes mainstream.

You might also be interested in:

• Poll results: what technologies do companies use to develop their intranets?
• What alternatives are there to Sharepoint for an intranet?

Comments

[Mike Pritchard]

Could be that people are listing 'Intranet' as a kind of satellite 'skill' because they've been included in work centring on an intranet, which may not be something that's normally part of their core role. Such people may feel their groovy intranet skills are worth mentioning, but not that they'd get much value out of joining an intranet group.

[Ria Breuer]

I see many people using LinkedIn only as a 'connections collector'. They create a profile and connect to people they know, but do not share any updates nor participate in discussions.