Personal Branding

What is a personal brand? Your personal brand is an expression of who you are and who you aspire to be. It’s how you show up in the professional world. Your personal brand is the combination of experience, skills, background and passion. This combination is what makes you unique.

Your experience can be from educational or professional. This could be from internships (paid/unpaid), prior work experience, volunteer, studying abroad, shadowing, student teaching or other experiential learning experiences.

Your skills are what you can do. These are abilities that you have developed through the classroom and/or from your professional experiences or from things you’ve done on your own like a micro-internship or other micro-credentials.

Example skills:

  • Soft skills/competencies: teamwork, communication, leadership, professionalism, problem solving, adaptability, etc
  • Technical skills: SQL, programming, Mircosoft Suite, Google Suite, Adobe, Trello, Zoom etc
  • Language proficiency

Your background could be your cultural identity, your athletic history, region where you’re from, religion or anything that is meaningful to who you are as an individual.

Your passions are what you love to do, what motivates you and what’s most important to you.

How does a personal brand help?

Having a consistent personal brand can help in the following ways:

Credibility: Through consistent messaging between your online and offline prescence, you are able to build credibility through your actions and behaviors. This article by Mitchell Levy goes more into details on how to cultivate credibility.

Visibility: 74% of recruiters source job candidates from LinkedIn and 94% of recruiters use LinkedIn to vet candidates. You can see how having an online presence can be important in the professional world. Your personal brand will show up through the posts you choose to create, the reposts you choose to share, and the people you choose to follow.

Build Relationships: Having a consistent personal brand helps you build connections and develop those connections into meaningful relationships. If you are interested in the tech industry, you may follow such leaders that aligns with your values and/or aspirations. You may join clubs and associations with other individuals and build your professional network.

Achieve Career Goals: Having a well thought out personal brand can help you navigate the job search process. This is great when speaking to company recruiters and providing a quick snap shot about who you are, how your experience, skills, background and passion align with their work.

Where Does Your Personal Brand Show Up?

In Person

  • Networking events
  • Job fairs
  • Interviews

Online

  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

On Paper

  • Resume
  • Cover Letter

Let’s Build Your Brand

You will work through two activities to help you build your personal brand. You’ll build an Elevator Pitch and translating that to your About section on LinkedIn.

An elevator pitch is a 30 seconds pitch or introductions that’s well crafted to make a meaningful first impression at job fairs, networking events and more! Your elevator pitch should include:

  • Introductions
  • Quick summary of you – experience, skills, background, passion
  • Explain what you want
  • Wrap it up and ask a question

Example:

ExperienceSkillsBackgroundPassion
Computer science major
STEM Peer Mentor
SQL
Speaks 3 languages
First generation
Born in Somalia
Softwarer Engineer
Connecting the dots

Elevator Pitch:

Hi! My name is Abdi. I’m studying computer science at Augsburg University. I am a first generation college student who speaks 3 languages. My experience has really shaped my passion of becoming a software engineer because I enjoy connecting the dots across applications and people from different cultures. I’m looking for an internship that will allow me to combine both my technical skills and people skills. Are there opportunies in your organization that aligns with this?

Your Turn

  1. On a piece of paper, make 4 columns. At the top, write down experience, skills, background and passion in each column.
  2. Under each column, write down 2-3 different things about you. You may need to reflect on your college experience, this includes any student organizations or leadership positions you’ve held, any paid or unpaid work, and your life up to this moment. (see example above)
  3. Once you completed your list, take bits and pieces of your experience and use it to craft your elevator pitch. Follow the elevator pitch format above. You may need to create multiple pitches and see which one resonates with who you are.

Your LinkedIn About section occupy prime real estate on your profile. They give you the opportunity to introduce yourself and connect to the people who want to learn more about you. With it’s 2,600 character limit, the summary gives you approximately 370 words to explain who you are, what you do and what makes you unique.

Your About section should:

  • Take the elevator pitch you crafted and expand it by adding more details to tell your story.
  • Emphasize your first three lines. Visitors only see your first three lines before they have to click more.
  • Include a call to action to give visitors a reason to connect deeper with you.

Example:

Elevator Pitch

Hi! My name is Abdi. I’m studying computer science at Augsburg University. I am a first generation college student who speaks 3 languages. My experience has really shaped my passion of becoming a software engineer because I enjoy connecting the dots across applications and people from different cultures. I’m looking for an internship that will allow me to combine both my technical skills and people skills. Are there opportunies in your organization that aligns with this?

LinkedIn About section

I am an aspiring web and software developer who enjoys connecting the dots- be it ideas from different disciplines, people from different culutres or applications from different industries.

Besides being a tech enthusiast, I love connecting with people. I was born in Somalia and speak 3 languages (English, Somali and Arabic). My experience being a first generation college student and love of connecting with people has helped me interact with people from all over the world and made everlasting friendship along the wau.

Any inquiry or just love to connect? Please feel free to message me.