Read this post to find out how Career Planning is very similar to Personal Branding because it’s all about your most valuable asset: YOU!
Recently I spoke at the WIN Conference in Rome, a big international event for professional women (and a few men). My topic was ‘LinkedIn: The Epicenter of Personal Branding’. These ladies were a bit different from my usual audience because 70% of them are big leaders in the corporate world, where my usual audience are entrepreneurs. But my workshop aimed to show them that in order to be successful in today’s new era, where the human is again the center of attention, and brand loyalty is less important, they needed to be building their personal brand!
How did I convince these career-driven professionals that they need to invest in their personal brand, not just be ambassadors of their company brand?
By showing them that
Personal Branding is pretty much the same as Career Planning!
Both exercises have one main focus: YOU! You are your most valuable asset and you need to invest in it. Also, whether you want to call it Career Planning or Personal Branding, you need to start by really getting to know yourself and what you stand for. Here is some food for thought:
What are your 5 main values?
What are values? Values reflect what is important to you. They describe your motivations and drive your decision-making. They define who you are, what you stand for. It’s important to know them so when presented with a new opportunity you can always compare it to your values in order to make a decision that feels good to you. This Personal Values Assessment might help you to find out your 5 main values. Mine are:
- family
- balance
- authenticity
- growth
- independence
What are you passionate about?
The next step is to analyze your passions. Passions are how you like to spend your time. Some people are very passionate about sports, good causes, music etc. What are you passionate about? What do you like doing with your time?
Personality Traits
I’m sure you have heard about the Myers-Briggs Personality types. It’s the most commonly used test to define your personality traits. It tells you whether you are Extroverted or Introverted, Sensing or Intuitive, Thinking or Feeling, Judging or Perceiving. It gives you great insight into understanding how you see the world.
Another test I like is based on the research by Sally Hogshead, a book called ‘How the World Sees You’. It also comes with a test that gives you the information from the other perspective.
USPs
Once you have done this introspection then you are ready to define your Unique Selling Proposition. What are your skills? What is your expertise? What do you want to be hired for?
Brand Vision / Career Development Plan
You see? Whether you want to create your Personal Brand Vision or your Career Development Plan, the leg work is still the same. And the next steps are pretty similar as well. You need to roll back your sleeves and start working on your online & offline assets. Which is where your LinkedIn Profile comes in …
Change 5 Things on Your LinkedIn Profile 
There are many tips on how to improve your profile and many of them we’ve heard a million of times: ‘upload a photo, enter your experience, create a compelling summary, ’ etc.
In this report I tried to come up with new tips, that are just as important but
often overlooked.
Personal branding is something I’ve always struggled with… I just feel weird treating myself like a brand and talking about my positive traits. It’s like I feel like I’m “peacocking” or something, even though I’m not lying about my skills and positive traits… I don’t know; clearly it’s just something I need to get over!
I totally get it, Molly. Someone asked at the conference I gave it they should also mention things they weren’t good at on their LinkedIn Profile 🙂 No, you shouldn’t, but you should also not oversell yourself. I agree, it’s something you just need to get over 🙂 Because it’s important. Thanks for the comment, Molly. All my best, Sarah