Build It, Deliver It, Your Brand
5 min read
Branding can feel fake and phony. I am not here to tell you to be something you are not but rather to communicate who you are, what you do, and what you bring to the table. This will help you get started in building and communicating your brand in a professional setting.
This guide is prepared from the perspective of a software engineer. The bulk of this article is general and applicable to any field but does have one small section specifically for software engineers.
This Branding Guide is a good doc that will help get you started.
Build It
You first need to know who you are, what you do, and what you bring to the table before planning how to communicate and put forward your brand. You cannot effectively communicate and deliver something that you are unsure of.
First off, what is professional branding and why does it matter
Professional branding tells a story, highlights your strengths, skills, and unique attributes, establishes your reputation, and builds trust.
What Professional Branding is not
And just as important, what a professional brand is not. I never want you to force yourself into something or someone you are not. I will always advocate for the genuine you when building your brand. Most everyone can sniff out a phony and that will definitely hurt your brand.
Why building your professional brand is important
Speak For You
Your brand can speak for you. You won’t have to tell people what you have done, what you are doing, and what you are good at. This is great because nobody likes someone who is always talking about themselves or comes off as full of themselves.
Career Growth
Your brand can help grow and further your career. The main mechanism for this is greater visibility, recognizability, and rememberability. If people see you, you’re already breaking the first barrier, when people recognize and remember you, then you have a foot in the door to start building trust and making an impact.
Impact Others
Using your brand as a start to building trust allows you to have a positive impact on others. This can be through passing along technical skills and/or soft skills in an active or passive medium. Examples: mentoring, pair programming, blog posts.
How to build your Professional Brand
You need to know yourself and identify the characteristics and skills that you have built. It is essential to know your strengths so that you can use them in your work and interactions to make a lasting impact that is beneficial not only to you but to the people around you.
Who You Are
Most importantly you need to know who you are. Allow your values to speak for you.
What You Do
Paint a picture of what you have accomplished and how you accomplished those things.
What You Bring
You want others to know what you are capable of when it comes to contributing to the larger picture. This is the culmination of your technical skills and soft skills and how you put them into practice.
Deliver It
This is how you communicate your brand, explicitly and implicitly. The most important thing is you need to build trust with those you interact with.
Passive Engagement
These are the things you can set and update periodically.
The two keys to this are: completing your profiles and consistency across platforms, ie names, profile pictures, and so on.
In the development/engineering world, LinkedIn can be extremely useful. LinkedIn fortunately includes a built-in tool to help complete your profile.
GitHub
If you touch code in any way you will need to use GitHub. Employers and colleagues will be looking at your GitHub. It is beneficial to polish your profile.
Social Media
This is not a must like the previous two. However, it can be a great tool if you are able and willing to generate the content on a regular basis.
Content
This includes things like a personal website, blogging, articles, and tutorials. You can build your own blog, write and publish on Medium, and create video tutorials on youtube.
Active Engagement
These are the everyday things that you consistently need to be aware of and implement. Good active engagement will build trust and give you an avenue for communicating your brand.
You. Have. To. Build. Trust.
Interactions
Everyday communication is important. Your verbal and written communication is crucial in presenting your brand.
Presence
This is all about showing up, online and in person. You need to be aware and put effort into how you show up and present yourself.
Participation
It is important to always be ready and willing to positively and constructively contribute. You need to contribute when contributing is optional.
Finally…
It is important to remember This is not an overnight thing. You are not going to be able to formulate your professional brand in one sitting.
Your brand will only go as far as you can take it and in the direction, you want to take it. Do not choose strategies, strengths, values, and impressions that are not really you, because that is unsustainable.
This is not a formula. You decide what your brand is and how you put it out there. It is okay to allow your brand to evolve over time.
This is something that will evolve over time. You do not have to be the same person forever. Nothing gets better is nothing changes.