Posted by: Meridith Levinson in Best Practices
Subject: Individual Management
Weblog: Career Connection
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I'm usually astonished at the amount of targeted traffic personalized branding stories create for CIO.com. My previous tale to the matter, six Private Branding Mistakes that can Threaten Your Task Lookup, turned virtually 16,
Office Professional Plus 2007,000 page views in its initial week.
The figures notify me that CIO.com viewers are hungry for info on this matter. To understand why, I spoke to two personal branding strategists that have knowledge doing work with IT experts. They explained why individual branding is such a sizzling topic proper now as well since it professionals' most common hang-ups around the apply.
Randi Bussin,
Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise, a licensed occupation coach and Reach personalized branding strategist, attributes IT professionals' curiosity in personalized branding towards the levels of competition in present day career market place. They understand that landing a whole new work needs a whole lot more effort than seeking the world wide web and sending out resumes, she says of her customers in IT.
At the identical time,
Windows 7 Professional, she adds, they are viewing and hearing a whole lot concerning the part individual branding can perform in their task searches, nevertheless they do not understand how to place the principles of personalized branding into practice for by themselves.
"People are realizing you have to do this," says Bussin. "It's a non-negotiable. If you can't say what makes you unique from everyone else applying for precisely the same career, you're going to have a hard time rising above the noise."
Personal branding is equally important to IT professionals who want to increase their career security,
Microsoft Office 2007 Pro, if not advance their careers with their current employers, notes personal branding strategist Catherine Kaputa, who is also a speaker and the author of You Are a Brand!
"In the business world, soft power trumps hard power," she says. "The farther up you go in a company, the more important these soft power skills are."
These soft power skills, which include leadership ability, communication skills, presentation skills,
Microsoft Office Professional 2007, and relationship-building skills—combine to create an individual's private brand.
Despite the advantages individual branding confers to IT experts, the apply can be painful for them. Here are four common pain points IT professionals expertise all around private branding:
1. Some don't want private branding to matter in their career advancement.
"A good deal of info technology people are struck by the fact that the school rules no longer apply in the business world," says Kaputa. In school, she says, the student grind pays off: Their intelligence and hard work leads to good grades and academic recognition. But in the business world, she adds, intellect and hard work aren't often enough to yield a promotion or career offer, and this bothers some IT specialists. Candidates often need to showcase exceptional soft skills and have good reputations at the same time.
2. They don't like the idea that their appearance matters.
Like it or not, your individual brand is inextricably bound up with your appearance—the way you dress, whether or not you wear glasses, your grooming. "There's a great deal of evidence that packaging plays a strong position in how people view you," says Kaputa. If you want to be a VP, you need to dress the part, she says,