With the New Year ushering in, the LinkedIn research team felt it would be a perfect occasion to release its insights and analyses from 2011 to provide a cue for 2012 as how to best leverage the professional social network, rather how not to. It refreshed its list of overused buzzwords by job seekers and others in the official domain!

For the purpose, its team took a close look at the over 135 million professional profiles on its website.  What differences does one get to see from last year?

• Setting aside a few methodological changes, broadly speaking, one sees that ‘creative’, ‘effective’, ‘strategic planning’, and ‘communication skills’ have recurred in this year’s list.
• Comparing terms, which could make it on both last year’s and this year’s list, one can see that top buzzword  of last year ‘extensive experience’ has also made it to top three this year as well.
• ‘Motivated’ has now been ranked higher than the word ‘innovative’ and those such as ‘fast-paced’, ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘results-oriented’ are off the list.

This year’s top buzzword in the U.S. is ‘creative’. In fact, taking into the international presence and peculiar choices of its members, cutting across countries, the site also prepared a list of the top buzzwords for select countries. The number one buzzwords for some of the countries are as follows:

1. Problem solving: Italy
2. Motivated: Ireland
3. Creative: UK, US, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, Australia
4. Effective: India
5. Managerial: Spain
6. Multinational: Brazil
7. Dynamic: France
8. Track record: Singapore

So in case you happen to be a LinkedIn member in France, Italy or Germany, you well perhaps be a ‘self-proclaimed’ creative and dynamic problem solver, the site notes in a lighter vein! Analyzing the list, a post on the professional social platform mentioned:
“Maybe during the last year some of our members scrubbed their profiles of buzzwords and more uniquely described themselves? Or maybe there has been a huge growth in the number of ‘innovative, motivated, entrepreneurial team players who are results-oriented and thrive in fast-paced environments’. To the data!”

Here are the top 10 buzzwords for the United States:

• Creative
• Organizational
• Effective
• Estensive experience
• Track record
• Motivated
• Innovative
• Problem Solving
• Communication skills
• Dynamic

For the previous year’s survey, the researchers incorporated non-English profiles as well in the analysis by translating them. They aggregated the peculiar adjectives in the ‘summary’ section of public profiles of its member, removing some of the overused nouns (for e.g., ‘mobile’) apart from other irrelevant terms.

The team sorted words from that list by frequency and considered the top 10 for different countries. As part of its meticulous methodology, LinkedIn adopted a more agnostic approach compared to the last year and allowed the adjectives to sort themselves out, versus starting off with a list of predefined buzzwords and then ranking them.