Rebranding is usually seen as a tactic used by companies with the goal of changing their brand identity. But rebranding is also a strategy you can use to improve your career development.
Maybe you are looking to change your career or you just want to work on your reputation in your field of expertise? Either way, one of the smartest career moves you could make is to rebrand yourself.
Working on your personal brand allows you to make yourself (and your skills) more appealing to new employers or to get promoted on a current job. It’s a strategy that will allow you to take your career to the next level.
Rebranding isn’t rocket science. However, if you don’t get this right, you will struggle to be seen differently.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at 7 easy ways to rebrand yourself.
Identify Your Professional and Personal Goals
You can’t hit a target if you don’t have a target in mind.
In other words, unless you know what your professional goals are, you can’t expect to be able to rebrand yourself and progress with your career.
Therefore, before you do anything else, it’s really important that you identify exactly what you want:
- What are you looking to achieve?
- What type of field do you want to work in?
- What would be a good salary for you?
Once you’ve identified your professional goals, you’ll need to identify some personal goals, too. Maybe you want more work-life balance and more time with your family?
This is definitely something to consider while thinking about your career development.
Write down your professional and personal goals and define the steps that will get you there. This will all go a long way in helping you rebrand.
Work On Your Soft Skills and Hard Skills
There are two types of skills that will help you get the job you want or to get ahead in your career.
Those are: Hard skills and soft skills.
You need both! Hard skills are technical skills that might include knowledge of a specific job. Such as:
- Database management
- Data mining
- Adobe Software suite
Review your professional goals, identify what hard skills you need to learn – and learn them!
Soft skills are related to personality traits and the way you relate with other people. Depending on the career change you’re looking for, they might include:
- Teamwork
- Critical thinking
- Creativity
- Problem-solving abilities
Both hard and soft skills are important to employers, so the winning strategy is to work on both types of skills and to showcase them in your resume and social media profiles as explained below.
Update Your LinkedIn Profile
Recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates just like you. It’s really important that you update your LinkedIn profile so: a) recruiters find you and b) they’re encouraged to invite you to apply for the role.
- Here are some tips:
- Choose a professional photo
- Write a killer headline related to your job, but also to YOU
- Avoid buzzwords
- Use keywords related to your preferred field
- Network
- List your hard and soft skills
Update Other Social Media Accounts
As well as using LinkedIn, recruiters these days also scour Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook profiles in order to properly vet candidates. This is why it’s so important that you update each of your social profiles so that they appeal to any future employer.
- Add a professional photo
- Retweet articles and stats related to your preferred field
- Check your grammar
- Tweak your bio so that it’s more professional (but also personal)
- Use hashtags to showcase the things you enjoy doing
- Be active
Work On Networking
Not everyone likes to network. But networking is a must if you want to rebrand yourself.
As long as there are networking events in your area, it’s important that you go there with both your professional and personal goals in mind (see above).
You can use networking events to:
- Meet new people
- Add them to LinkedIn
- Leverage your other social media profiles
- Potentially land interviews
When networking, it’s important that you do the right things. Such as:
- Never ask for a job
- Build rapport with people and, when possible, ask them for advice on what you should change on your resume
- Never take up someone’s valuable time
- Engage people but let them speak (in other words: listen)
Update Your Resume
Your resume remains one of your greatest tools as you look to find a new job. Now that you’re rebranding yourself, it’s time to update it. Here are some things you’ll need to change:
- Your resume objective
- Your transferable skills
- Your skills section (note the hard and soft skills above)
- Your format
It may also be that you’ll need to remove certain buzzwords, jargon and past employment that’s no longer relevant.
Continue Your Education
As the great investor Warren Buffet once said, “the more you learn, the more you earn.”
In other words, nothing will help you more as you seek to change your career and rebrand yourself than education.
Whatever you do, keep learning and keep growing. Learn things about your next career and field of work, but also learn things outside your chosen career. Absorb knowledge, master new skills. You don’t know where it could all take you.
There are lots of reasons to change your career. If you’ve decided that changing your career is the next move for you, it’s important that you rebrand yourself in a way that gives yourself a fighting chance of landing the job of your dreams.
Use the tips in this article to make yourself stand out from the crowd. This will require some time and effort, but the end result will boost your employability, and it will also present a learning curve that you can fall back on should you ever need to rebrand yourself again.
Written by Anita Sambol
With years of experience as a content strategist and creator, Anita has a ‘super-power’ of being a clear human voice for brands when talking to their audience. One of the projects she currently enjoys the most is being a content associate at EU Business School, where she’s writing about business education, student life and online learning.
