Personal Branding for career success

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Dr Denise Taylor

18 January 2013

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Branding has been used by companies since the 1940s as a way of attracting their ideal clients. More recently it is being used by individuals to manage their career and be successful in their ideal job opportunity.
Always interested in new ways I can help my clients I trained as a Personal Branding Strategist in 2011, through REACH Personal Branding.
The Founder of Reach Personal Branding, William Arruda produces a yearly summary of trends for the forthcoming year. His key trends are

1. Curation

Developing new content isn’t the only way to build a reputation. We can also curate content we find on the web. I’m using scoop.it to curate great articles on career advice and also fit and healthy. As I come across interesting articles it is easy to link these to the page, and to quickly amass followers. You can also automatically share the articles via Twitter and Facebook.  Other ways of curating content are to use Pinterest and Tumbler.

2. Customisation

It’s getting easier to customise social media. With YouTube you can choose from a colour palette, LinkedIn you can reorder content. William expects more choice on LinkedIn over the coming year such as to choose colour and design elements so you may not need a personal website.
You can also set up an about.me page; choose flavors.me or Zerply as an alternative to a personal website.

3. Mobile

Williams writes that over 80% of Smartphone users would use their phone to search for jobs. Out of the thousands available he recommends

  • Lunchmeet  – to find people who are geographically close to you so you could meet for lunch.
  • Pocketresume  – to use info from your LinkedIn profile and export your resume/CV to a PDF. It also lets you tailor your resume for specific positions.
  • Sparkhire  – a video interviewing platform. Job seekers create video responses to employers’ text-based questions.

4. People

Businesses are now encouraging staff to be active on social media as a positive spokesperson for the company through LinkedIn and tweets.

5. Pictures

The updated style of LinkedIn profiles  has many more images and looks much more appealing.
More use will be made of infographics and Kinzaa can be used to build an infographic resume/CV.  I don’t think this will replace a more word based CV but we can have both.  Other sites worth looking at include Prezi and Visualize.me.

6. QR Codes

These were new a year or so ago, I thought they had reached their peak and I’ve not seen as many. However, William writes that he is noticing them on storefronts, and will be seen on badges at conferences/networking events.

7. Timelines

Use images alongside word to create a timeline of your career.  Re.Vu is a good place to find out more.

8. Teams

Team branding is growing in popularity, its’ not just about an individual brand but also a team brand, currently used by sales and consulting teams it can be helpful as a sub group of a business brand, I can really see this being a next step on from team building and my background will give me the credibility to work in this area.

9. Validation

LinkedIn has introduced the endorsement feature. Not everyone is happy with this change, but it is building on the crowd sourcing approach of TripAdvisor. People are interested in what other people have to say so you should welcome the LinkedIn endorsement option.

10. Video

It’s getting increasingly easy to create videos and to share them on LinkedIn, Amazon reviews and more. The more you do, the greater your confidence and the easier to build your brand.
Read more through William’s article which you can access here
Brought to you by Denise Taylor, double award winning career psychologist with Amazing People (www.amazingpeople.co.uk) and the author of ‘How To Get A Job In A Recession.’ My 7th book ‘Getting the Job You Want’ published by ICON books is now on sale.

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