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.