Branding

Wednesday after work I went to a SWE Professional Development Workshop at BAE in Lexington, Ma. It was a great topic and I got to see my good friend Robin who was also going. SWE is the Society for Woman Engineers and they usually put on a workshop or seminar every month or so. The speaker was Thelma Kailiwai from Raytheon in Tewksbury and she spoke about "Developing Your Personal Brand".

She covered the importance of reputation and branding yourself. Reputation is other people's perception of you while branding is projecting what you want people to recognize you for.

Reputation has a big impact in reaching your career goals and can significantly help or hurt you. The steps to managing your reputation are to be aware of how you are seen by people who have influence over your career opportunities and by using any feedback you receive to improve. Feedback can come in the form of assessments, comments, and project debriefing sessions. Knowing where you stand helps in deciding the right path towards reaching your goals.

One way of improving your reputation is by branding yourself. Branding distinguishes yourself from others doing similar work, shows your true identity, highlights your talents, and establishes your position in business.

To develop your brand you need to find out who you are and what your values are. In an upcoming blog I will talk about exercises you can do to help figure this out. Your brand needs to have consistency, clarity, and authenticity. You need to also define what your dreams are and put them into action. Find out who you are and what your dreams are; sounds easy but try and put it down on paper!

So this was my attempt at explaining what it was all about, now I'll try and put it into action for myself.