Susan Guarneri recently wrote a great post on personal branding and that prompted me to think. I need prompting to think on most days!
Susan’s a big fan of psychometric assessment and I think we all know where I stand on that one! I do feel though that if the results of assessments are presented in a simple and understandable format, that makes a big difference.
The first challenge with developing a personal brand is to have a decent understanding of who you are. Obviously this is a little more difficult if you’re a student who hasn’t had much experience yet. A very useful way of quickly ramping up your self insight and career focus is to get some 360 degree feedback from your friends and network. 360 what? This is a common tool in business and enables colleagues to provide feedback on one another as a way of improving performance.
What you need to do is to ask a few trusted people in your network some pertinent questions. Give them some time to think through this before answering. Better still, send them the questions in an email.
1) What do you think I’m particularly good at?
2) What words best describe me as a person?
3) What careers could you see me being successful in and why?
If you get 5 friends and family members to complete these, you’ll be in a good position to start thinking about what makes you unique. You can then get going with personal branding - more about that later.
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I can’t stand that psychological testing stuff… It is a complete generalisation and doesn’t take into account motivation or enthusiasm… One step away from genetically testing people to see if their biologically suitable for a job…!!!!