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Why You Need to Brand Yourself
in the New World of Work
By Catherine Kaputa, Personal
branding strategist, coach and speaker
Self branding makes more
sense than ever in today's marketplace. Jobs are different today.
It used to be that you worked for a few companies in your lifetime--or
maybe even one. Today, jobs are getting shorter and shorter in length.
You can count on four or eight or more jobs in your lifetime.
It's a market in which there
is too much product. (Read ‘employees’ if you are an executive, ‘competitors’ if you are an entrepreneur or professional.)
And a market in which there
is too little demand. (Read ‘jobs’ or ‘business’.)
And a market whose needs
- and the work that needs to be done in it - keeps changing.
It's a world where people
will need to change careers, professions or businesses based on marketplace
realities.
A world where people will
need to change what they do at a job in the same company based on new work
needs at that company - work needs that weren't in the old job description.
It's a world where many jobs
likely won't come back when the economy gets better. A world where
more and more companies will be reinventing themselves with more fluid
workforce model.
Many people think that they
need to sharpen their focus and define their market more clearly.
I see the reality of today’s work world quite differently. You never
reach the horizon because it keeps moving, so you must refine what you
do continuously.
The "dejobbing" of America
William Bridges, a leading
writer on work transition, uses "dejobbing" to describe how the landscape
of the workplace is changing and says that "the work of the Information
Age does not lend itself to ‘jobs’ as neatly as industrial work did."
In the Industrial Age, Bridges
points out, there were linear work processes that were easy to segment
into separate job functions and areas of responsibility. There were long
periods of predictable activity. Market conditions didn't change very often.
Today, the dynamics of the
Information Age are completely different.
Companies in the new Information
Age will increasingly adopt a more flexible workforce model: a business
model that ramps up for a big project, and skinnies down when the project
is completed.
To see the future, Bridges
suggests we look at the movies.
In the era of the big studios
in the 1940's, chances are that you would have been a studio employee -
whether you were an actor, a director, a camera operator, a makeup artist
or a publicist.
The rise of independent film
companies and competition from television changed all that. Today, big
movie projects are put together by ad hoc groups of independent people
and small businesses under an independent producer.
These changes will take a
while to evolve, but the wheels are in motion. Even today, economic forecasters
are calling for a "jobless recovery" after the tough economy of 2000-2002.
In the new world of business,
there will be fewer and fewer "permanent jobs.
So the people who will survive
best, even thrive, will need to run their career as a "business," whether
they are an employee or an independent contractor.
The self brand mindset
Today’s challenging work
world demands strategic thinking and adaptability, and in that world, a
self brand mindset is a tremendous asset.
With self branding, you empower
yourself. Self branding means looking at yourself as a marketer would
look at a product that he or she wants to make a winning brand. You
develop a plan to create a valuable asset out of yourself. It's the
same way when you make the change to seeing yourself as a brand, and adopt
what Theodore Levitt calls "the marketing imagination."
The first thing you would
do if you were a marketer is to analyze the external environment the
broad marketplace and the internal one the brand You and its competitors.
It helps to categorize major market dynamics through something marketers
use called a SWOT analysis, isolating on a grid four components
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
The marketer then looks for
how his brand can take advantage of new trends and changes taking place.
What problems need to be solved? What needs aren't being met? The
marketer focuses on key resources and attributes that differentiate his
brand. Skills and abilities the brand has that are a solution for the market
problem.
In thinking like a marketer,
you build a personal brand identity - packaging - that's different, relevant
and memorable. You market your distinctiveness and the value you
add over competitors. You develop a marketing plan for your career or business.
And execute it. Along the way, you respond to new market dynamics.
If something isn't working, you change trains. At key points in time, you
measure your effectiveness.
Create your own future
There is no security in
a job, any job, unless you add value to what the company does, or add value
to what the customer gets for his money.
Acting like a self brand
arises out of a decision that you want to take control and that there is
more to do. You want to be part of the solution, not complaining
about the problem. It comes from the belief that you have more to accomplish,
that you haven't fulfilled your potential yet.
Self branders establish the
greatest freedom, which is responsibility. Self branders make their own
luck,create their own opportunities. Self branders are always working for
themselves, even when they are working for a boss. They don’t make
the common mistake of spending their entire lives minding someone else’s
business and forgetting to mind their own business.
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