Career Assets | Great Occupations

Part III. Cultivating Your Individual Brand

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In part one and two I talked about the first ingredient of your brand – your skills, talents and traits. In part three, I’m going to tell you about the last two ingredients that go into making your individual brand… Passion and Accomplishments. So, you have the whole recipe now. Take your Skills/Talents/Traits, add in your Passion and top it off with your Accomplishments. Okay, so you do know what you’re passionate about, right? Hey, maybe you’re not. I’ve learned to not make assumptions that folks know this stuff. I mean, it’s hard to find the time to sit around and self-reflect. Life is busy. Life is distracting. I asked someone recently what she enjoys doing in her spare time, and she remarked, “What spare time?” If you don’t know what you’re passionate about…

Part II: Cultivating Your Individual Brand

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Taking stock of your career assets includes taking a look at your personal traits. Traits are not the same as personal values, nor are they the same as skills. Traits specifically describe how we do our work in the world. Create a list of your traits – you can find traits online, of course, but the best list I’ve ever seen is in What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles. Round up what you think are your top 5 traits and then, if you dare…

Part I: Cultivating Your Individual Brand

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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…