How to Define Your Personal Brand
Posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2017
One key aspect of job hunting that you may hear pretty frequently is the concept of personal branding. Branding yourself can help you stand out to potential employers and make you super memorable to contacts in your network. We’ve written a complete guide on branding yourself as a student, which you can read here.
Branding yourself can be a difficult undertaking. It’s hard to take an objective look at yourself and figure out what facets you should feature in your personal brand. You may understand how to market your brand during your job search, but how do you figure out what your brand actually is?
Thankfully, there are some questions you can ask yourself to really dig deep into your personal brand. Below, we take an in-depth look at some of them, so you can get to work on branding yourself.
Step 1: Consider What You Love
Your brand is the persona you want to reflect out to professionals in your field. We use the word ‘persona’ here, but don’t be misled—your brand should be an authentic reflection of who you are as a person. People will see right through you if you try to be someone you’re not.
To stay true to yourself through your brand, start by listing things that you love. Think of both professional things and personal things throughout this exercise.
Some questions to consider are:
- What topics could you talk about for hours?
- What do you value?
- What makes you feel good?
- What is your purpose?
- What’s the underlying reason that you do what you do?
- What are your daily habits?
Some of these questions are pretty deep, and may take some real introspection. To build a successful brand, you need to really know yourself, and that means taking some time to think very clearly about what you want out of life.
Knowing what you love—both at and outside of work—will help you figure out what you stand for as a person.
Example
For example, you may feel passionately about animal welfare, and volunteering at a shelter may make you feel great. This may not have anything to do with your career path, but the experiences you have while volunteering for the shelter could translate into valuable transferable skills to use during your job search.
This exercise may also help you identify what key aspects of your personality will form the basis of your brand. Using the animal welfare example above, you may realize that you felt so strongly about this issue that you had to do something, exemplifying that you’re determined and empathetic—great characteristics for any brand.
Take some time to think clearly about these questions, and those kinds of patterns will start to emerge.
Step 2: Think About What You’re Good At
Next, consider where your strengths lie. Again, don’t limit this solely to work-related things—your whole life plays into your brand, because you are a whole, authentic person.
Ask yourself these kinds of questions:
- What are your best subjects at school?
- What makes you different from everyone else?
- What comes easy to you?
- What kind of role do you play in group work?
- What parts of your program are easy to you?
Knowing the answers to these questions will help you a couple of ways. First, you’ll start identifying what kinds of skills, both industry and transferable, you can bring to the table during your job hunt. Second, you’ll start identifying what differentiates you from your peers, against whom you’ll be competing during your job search.
Example
Let’s consider the example of being involved with animal welfare. Going through these questions, you may realize that your best subject at school was English, and that you find it really easy to lead groups. You may realize, then, that you’re really good at getting your message across and bringing groups together. You’re a motivator. That’s a huge thing to include in your brand.
Step 3: Think About What You Don’t Like
If you’re struggling to come up with answers to the above questions, you might find it helpful to think about the problem from a different angle. Sometimes it’s easier to know what we don’t want than what we do, so ask yourself what kinds of things you don’t like.
Consider:
- What is your least favourite subject at school?
- What kinds of things really bother you in group work?
- What situations upset you?
These kinds of questions may help you pinpoint what kinds of things are important to you and, therefore, can play a role in defining your brand.
Example
For example, you may realize that you get upset with teammates don’t follow through on their word. That might mean that integrity is a key aspect of what’s important to you. By taking this kind of deep look at your feelings, you’ll start to realize what unconscious expectations and standards you have in place.
Step 4: Put It Together
Based on the questions above, we’ve figured out some key things in our example case. We’ve identified that these are some of your characteristics:
- Determination
- Empathy
- Leadership
- Integrity
That’s the basis of a really strong brand. You could consider marketing yourself as an empathetic leader determined to make a difference in your field. That’s a great message to represent.
Once you’ve identified what your brand is, you can start building it by following our guide. You’re well on your way!
If you would like to learn more about the Algonquin College co-op program, please visit our website at https://www.algonquincollege.com/coop/, connect with us at coop@algonquincollege.com or call us at 613-727-4723 Ext.7623. You can also follow us on Twitter @AlgonquinCoop.