Not able to get skills using Linkedin API?

Question

I am trying to build a small application where I can find the skills of people in my LinkedIn network. I have been successfully able to do a people search to find the person's id.

But I am not able to get skills of the person whose id I am having.

I am not if that is possible to get skills of a person in my first and second degree connection through LinkedIn.

Answer 1

I have the same issue. You certainly can retrieve skills of a member profile whose was authorized via LinkedIn (you're making calls on the behalf of this user). But it seems like you cannot get the skills of 1st and 2nd level connections.

Reading the LinkedIn developers forum I got a lot of answers and questions about the profile fields. Some people say - yes it is possible, the others no. BTW LinkedIn employees say NO, plus you can find systems/application which can get such information - for instance apigee.com but look at this thread: API keys (there is talking about the positions not sills but the access to this information is similar)

Looks like the API key that allows you to access the first degree connections past positions was generated before our August 2012 release. That release introduced the member permissions and any keys generated post that release will not allow you to access past positions of your connections. Users that still have the old keys can continue to use that functionality till they opt-in to migrate their keys to the newer version which also allows access to more fields such as user email address.

Answer 2

TL;DR - You cannot retrieve connections' skills using Linkedin's API.

From Linkedin's Connections API reference:

For 1st degree connections, you may only retrieve profile fields available with the r_basicprofile member permission

However: while the skills field is not available with the r_basicprofile permission, it seems that the skills are publicly available and thus may be extracted via some other method, eg. scraping.