Real Works are the Falmouth University Employment Services this week’s challenge activity was to complete The Art of the Approach course. I focused on the Personal Branding element of the course material.
“A “Personal Brand” is the objective, where “Personal Branding” is the process and strategy by which to achieve the objective.”
Personal branding is not something that I have considered beyond my CV and LinkedIn profile.
I believe that the brand I created in my professional sphere needs to be adapted to showcase my creative skills and reach a different audience. The Art of the Approach was helpful with regards to my CV. I need to restructure to a technical CV and elevate skills to the top to highlight my UX skills and my transferable skills.
Since embarking on this course, I have become acutely aware that I need to engineer my personal branding. I have not had experience exploiting other social media platforms for self-promotion. According to Grasz Career Builder indicated that 60% of employers have used social networking information to hire candidates (Grasz, 2016). “Students need to understand and deliberately cultivate their digital presence. Educators need to teach students about the social processes and artefacts that influence perception so that students can better maintain and control their personal brand” (Hearn, 2008; Montoya & Vandehey, 2009).
Manel Khedher identified an approach to creating a Personal brand “This process involves three phases just like other brands”. The First is to establish a brand identity, the second phase is personal brand positioning, the third stage is Personal Brand assessment.
My brand Identity
I have written some bullet points to describe my personal brand based on business communications:
- Passionate about creativity and change
- Empathetic, supportive, and nurturing
- Friendly approachable
- Value-driven
I think I will need to spend time thinking about my story and how I convey my personal brand through Social Media, my CV and my Portfolio.
Personal Brand Positioning & Personal Brand assessment
I found a framework on a website called OBERLO that outlined a step-by-step approach to improving your Personal Brand. I have used the framework and included responses to detail my methodology and actions I need to take:
- Research and create your personal branding statement: Define your audience at this stage and audit competitor that may exist for you:
- My audience will be employers, peers, people with similar interests and career aspirations.
- As competitors will be other people in the field, I have set up a Twitter account to follow influential UX practitioners. I am hoping this will provide access to useful information about trends and how to present myself.
- Once I have completed my research, I will create my statement
- Build a personal branding strategy: Plan how to engage with your target audience and define what success will look like for you in two months, nine months, two years.
- Two-month Target: have a brand statement, set up accounts on Instagram and Twitter post some examples of my work and engage with other users once a week.
- Six-month Target: Update linked in and my CV
- 1 Year Target: Complete a Portfolio
- 2 Year Target: Build my UX network
- Monitor your personal engagement: Promote positive participation and have a plan of action for negative remarks.
- Review social media once a week, respond to messages and engage in debates, post comments.
- Actively post and engage with the student cohort, Scrum Alliance, and the UX Mastery community
- Attend at least one networking event every 3 months
- Develop your personal brand: Aim to share your personal brand through social media, networking, outreach, and speaking opportunities. Consider blogging, vlogging, Podcasts and other ways that you could promote your personal brand in a way that your audience will consume the content quickly.
- Continue updating my blog weekly
- Actively look for opportunities to present
- Have a communication plan: Controlling your presence online can be time-consuming so this plan will help you with negative backlash and help you to easily provide information to partners that you will work with down the line.
- I plan to create some stock statements about myself and links to my work to reduce the time spent online.
- I also plan to ring-fence time to monitor and update my social media.
- Measure your success regularly. Set some KPIs
- Increase my followers and connections by 50 across all platforms
- Post at least once a week
- Actively provide feedback within a week of it being requested
- Share my work and request feedback from the online community
Sources:
Johnson, K.M., 2017. The importance of personal branding in social media: educating students to create and manage their personal brand. International Journal of Education and Social Science, 4(1), pp.21-27.
Khedher, M., 2014. Personal branding phenomenon. International journal of information, business and management, 6(2), p.29.
Martins Ferreira, N., 2020. 0 PERSONAL BRANDING TIPS THAT’LL ELEVATE YOUR BUSINESS IN 2021. [Blog] http://www.oberlo.com, Available at: <https://www.oberlo.com/blog/personal-branding> [Accessed 4 May 2021].
Aktas, M., 2021. Top UX Designers to Follow in 2021. [Blog] userguiding.com, Available at: <https://userguiding.com/blog/top-ux-designers-to-follow/> [Accessed 4 May 2021].
PersonalBrand.com. n.d. Definition – What is a Personal Brand? | PersonalBrand.com. [online] Available at: <https://personalbrand.com/definition/> [Accessed 4 May 2021].
RealWORKs. ‘What makes a great CV?’. The art of the approach. [course content]. Available at: https://realworks.careercentre.me/resources/taskmanager/default.aspx?ProgrammeID=0CEjEGg1TYV2%20GCek1zfiQ== [accessed 04/05/2021].
2021. [image] Available at: <https://www.pexels.com/photo/marketing-strategy-6229/> [Accessed 04 May 2021].
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