5 Top Tips to Develop Your Career Branding

An effective career or personal branding is an important tool for career advancement. It helps to promote your skills, experience, and positive personal attributes that will make you employable. Just like marketers, who promote and flaunt their brand to make it 'sellable', so must you and I work on our brand to make ourselves worth employing.

Muovo has found the following are five tips, adapted from QuintessentialCareers, useful in that they should give you the necessary tools to start or continue developing your personal brand. This being said, personal branding can be a useful tool to anyone – regardless of whether you have over thirty years of experience, or a fresh newly graduate. Always work on what you have, and accentuate your most marketable skills.

1. LinkedIn profile.
Whether you are a professional in the field, or a yearning professional, you should have a profile on LinkedIn. On joining, you can create your own business profile that can serve as both a resume and an introduction to your career brand. Once you complete your profile, you can then start building connections with other members and get introduced to new people through other people from your network.

2. Personal Website. 
A good way to showcase your projects, achievements, and skills is by developing a professional website. At a minimum, try to buy a domain name based on your name and publish your resume. You can also publish your career-portfolio, content-rich article, and other other keyword-filled materials are likely to attract potential employers to land on your website.

3. Twitter account. 
Every day, more and more individuals and businesses are tweeting information, ideas, links, and more - all in under 140 characters per tweet (message). Twitter, a networking and micro-blogging site, enables people to connect and communicate, developing both a following of people as well as following the tweets of others. Tweeting key information, resources, and other professional advice while building up your followers and following is a great relatively easy way to start your career brand.

4. Professional blog. 
If you are a decent writer and can commit to writing on a regular basis, then creating a professional blog would be a good and useful tool for you to promote your career brand. You can opt to make your job specialized, and therefore write and post content that is explicitly related to your area of expertise, or you can decide to leave it general. Also invite guest bloggers, that is, other bloggers who will post (preferably original content) on your own blog if you run short of time.

5. Create (at least) two social networking profiles.
Consider joining at least two social-networking sites. One should be a general social-networking site, such as Facebook, and one should be career-specific (which you can find by searching Google; keep in mind that most professions have multiple networking sites). Networking with others (whether online or offline) is one of the most powerful tools of job-hunting as the majority of jobs are filled through referrals, not through responses to job postings.

In sum, the most important elements to consider are: gaining experience, tracking your accomplishments, promoting yourself (wisely) to co-workers, bosses, etc., developing a web presence for Googlability, and finally, building professional and sound relationships (rather than just casual networking).

Your future job-search success largely depends on building and developing your online career brand. Instead of wasting hours posting your resume on the major job boards and applying to jobs that may not even exist, use that time instead to focus your energies on following the advice in this article to build your online career brand - even simply starting with one of these tools and moving to the others as you have more time.

Best wishes!

Nikita Pisani at Muovo

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