Branding Yourself – Creating Your Brand (Part 1 of 3)

Branding Yourself – Creating Your Brand (Part 1 of 3)

You most likely have heard the term, branding, before, but often the concept is quite perplexing when it comes to professionally branding oneself. Branding is quite useful for a jobseeker in that colleagues in your network will most likely associate certain qualities to you and feel a sense of loyalty to you, which will assist both you and your network to work effectively in tandem to find professional opportunities that are a fit for you and your career goals.

To begin to establish your brand, you need to self-evaluate and determine which of your strengths are fairly unique, highly valued, hard to find characteristics to your field. For example, if you are interested in finding a position as an accountant and you have skills in leadership development (i.e., you have experience working with and developing other individuals’ skills as leaders). You want to think of between 3-5 characteristics that will be part of your brand.

Step 1:

1) Begin with self-reflection.

a. Come up with a list of those qualities.

2) Ask trusted others.

a. Speak with supervisors, colleagues, and family about the qualities that come to mind when thinking about you as a professional.

3) Look for commonalities among responses to develop your list.

a. These are the qualities that are most memorable and stand out about you currently.

4) Consider which characteristics would be unique, hard to find and highly valued in your industry.

a. For help, consider asking professors in your field, supervisors or others working in the field to assist you with narrowing down your characteristics and also adding new ones.

5) Add characteristics to your list that you are also actively working on developing currently that fit the criteria.

a. Think about qualities that are often missing in employees in your field.

b. What makes a star candidate and what qualities are essential that you can highlight.

i. Again, if you are in accounting, one of the qualities could be that you a meticulous (i.e., careful, precise).

6) Pick your 3-5 characteristics that will be part of your brand.

Remember: You would need to be able to concretely demonstrate your experience with the characteristics on your list. For example, if one of them is leadership development, these are some possible ways you would be able to demonstrate it: you were the President of a club and provided quarterly feedback to your executive board, you attended several trainings on delivering feedback, you brought in a trainer to your club on management styles.

In the next post, I will discuss how to establish your brand.

Welcoming the New Year by Taking Stock

With the new year fast approaching, this is wonderful time to take stock. Look back at 2009 and consider what went well professionally and what areas need improvement in 2010. Write a list of your accomplishments in 2009. What would you like to accomplish in 2010? Where would you like to see yourself in December of next year? Take a hard look at both what growth you have experienced and what areas need to be fortified.

Create a visioning board.

Set some short term goals for what you would like to accomplish over the next year. Each month set yourself objectives that are small steps to your short term goals. These objectives should be concrete, measurable, and achievable in the time that you have set. You should also create a plan section that lays out your thoughts about how you will achieve the objectives. You should be able to change the plan section in case an opportunity should come up that you did not anticipate.

For example, if you would like to build a bigger network in 2010.

-Your monthly objective could be to meet 2 new individuals per month.

-Your quarterly objective (3 month) could be to attend 1 networking event.

-Your plan could be to ask your contacts on LinkedIn to "introduce" you to 2 new people

You should post your goals, objectives and plans in some visible area. You should be able to see them regularly and be able to mark that you have achieved them. If you do not meet an objective, it is important to readjust and not feel that you have failed because it will sabotage your future success.

In today's professional world, you need to be able to manage your own career and to set professional goals for yourself. You should not expect others to set them for you and motivate you to achieve. This you NEED to do on your own. Your professional success and ability to leverage your assets will be reward.

Maximizing LinkedIn

Most jobseekers use LinkedIn.com to put up a profile, upload some contacts and maybe join some groups, but this site is such a powerful networking tool if you use it to its full potential. You should explore the site and see what features may be useful to your unique job search, but here are some tips for taking your LinkedIn profile to the next level.

1) Use the Company Search feature under "Companies" to do research and find contacts for informational interviews.

-It shows you subsidiaries of the company, current and past employees, promotions, new hires, and popular profiles of employees and how you are connected to them.

-You can see what job postings the company has on LinkedIn.

-Career paths of employees

-Information about the company and demographic information about employees

-You can also see recent news posted about the company.

2) Join groups with related interests. These groups are excellent for keeping you informed of the latest trends and developments in your profession as well as job opportunities and training. Individuals, who look at your LinkedIn profile, can see your professional affiliations.

-You can join alumni groups of your college or university to stay abreast of what opportunities are available to alumni.

-Join professional groups in your field. Some groups require that you have an actual membership to the group before you are allowed to join their LinkedIn group.

-Participate on groups by offering information that you find, do it regularly, but sparingly. You should NOT be posting everyday as you should be doing other things beside being online during a job search or while employed.

3) Use the Job Search function.

-Many companies solely place position ads on LinkedIn.

4) Make sure that you know who you are adding to your Contact List.

-LinkedIn is not like Facebook in that you should not be adding contacts just to rack up numbers. It is the quality of relationships and not the quantity that matters in good networking.

5) Change your LinkedIn Public Profile address (you can edit it from the Profile page) from the numbers and letter to your name (e.g., http://www.linkedin.com/in/janesmith).

-You can add it to your business card and email signature. Then a contact that you meet at networking event can preview your professional experience.

6) Import your resume.

-Make sure that it has been edited and that when you add new things to your resume that you upload your new version.

7) Be aware that when you create activity on your LinkedIn page (e.g., add to a discussion on a group or change your profile), your contacts are notified. You want to be on your contacts radar, but for good reasons and not constantly.

8) Skip the Personal Information.

No one should need your birthday or marital status for professional reasons.

9) If you have an interesting professional blog, use the "Blog Link" application to connect it your profile.

10) Even when you are not job seeking, you should continue to update your site and be active networking. Solid networks are built continually, not just when you need something from it. A network is a community that is best built earnestly.

What is critical to remember is that the most useful networking occurs in person and is about building reciprocal professional relationships that last throughout your career.