The Employability Forum   •   September 6, 2017

Personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands. While previous self-help management techniques were about self-improvement, the personal-branding concept suggests instead that success comes from self-packaging.

What do you stand for?
What makes you stand out?
What makes you compelling?

Imagine yourself in an interview and the interwar asked you-
What makes you different from all other candidates?
To answer that question you need to know yourself, you must have the idea of what you are capable to do that no one else can. Personal branding can help you do to identify that.
According to Dan Schwabel “Personal branding is an individual’s total perceived value, relative to competitors, as views by their target audiences.”

If you take business/product brand as an example-
First of all, they makes a list of all the features of a particular product, and then they try to identify what are the unique features of this product that no other competitors has.
Secondly, they target some specific group of people. Certain gender or age group.
Then they starts to promote the product by highlighting those unique features to the target audience.

Imagine, that product is you-
Now you have to look at your features, what skills you have, what makes you different from others? What are your personal qualities?
Choose your target customer in this case people who can potentially employ you or the people who can help you to connect with your desired employers.
After that you have to promote your features to your target audience. You have to give emphasize on your selling points. What are the unique abilities you have, what makes you better than anybody else.
• Your CV
• Your Social Media Profile
• What you wear
• How you talk
• Your body language
All of that communicates your personal brand to your target audience.

Ranjit Singh Malhi said in his book “Make Yourself Employable”-
Personal branding is crucial for career advancement in today’s highly competitive workplace because it helps to –

• Define who you are
• How you are great
• And how you should be sought out

So before people create your brand according to their opinion, create your own brand the way you like it.