Part I: Cultivating Your Individual Brand
by Angela Loëb
In the new world of work, cultivating your individual brand, your “saleable distinction,” is not optional. - Tom Peters
The first step in cultivating your individual brand is to analyze and inventory your career assets. In other words, you need to be able to sum up what you bring to the table.
Career assets include your skills, knowledge, traits and natural talents.
Determining your skills might be the easiest place to start. Skills are those things you can do that very likely required some sort of training – they are the application of the training. Learning to read, learning to type, learning to use a software program on a computer… these are all learned, applied skills.
Natural talents are on the other end of the assessing spectrum for most people. If you’re like most people, it’s hard to step back and look at yourself from an objective point of view and determine what your natural talents are. Why? Because your natural talents were always there, even as a child, and you probably take them for granted since they are such a part of you. Think about the things which come very easily to you. You might even have trouble understanding why something that seems so easy to you is hard for someone else.
It’s an important distinction – skills and natural talent. Having a knack for picking up computer programming languages isn’t the same as having the learned skill itself, especially when you have to keep receiving training on the latest and greatest language in demand.
To demonstrate the difference between skill and talent yet show how they are so intrinsic to each other, let’s look at a musical example. Jazz trumpeter, Miles Davis, seems to have had natural talent for music, and, indeed, his album, Kind of Blue, became one of the top selling jazz records of all time. You have to have talent to achieve such a feat. However, he didn’t just come out of the womb knowing how to play jazz music on a trumpet. He started taking lessons and acquiring music skills at 13 years old.
By the way, Miles Davis’ individual brand can be summed up in one word… “cool.” Now that’s what I call a brand!
Next up in this “Cultivating Your Individual Brand” series, I’ll look at traits as part of your career assets.
Angela Loëb is an author, speaker and co-owner of Great Occupations. She and her partner, Jay Markunas, help people make successful career transitions through workshops, “pajama learning” webclasses, personalized consulting sessions, as well as through The Job Search Boot Camp Show. Find out more at www.greatoccupations.com.
Attention Career Changers: Check out our upcoming workshop, “Destination: New Career!” coming up on October 23rd at www.greatoccupations.com/destination-new-career/
