If you know me, you know that this is one area I am obsessed it. B couldn’t possibly stand for anything else. I have talked incessantly about branding both here and other places. However, this time I am not going to talk about branding your company, your events, teams, programs or the like. This post is going to talk about YOU.
I want to know what your brand value is. What do people to turn to you for? If I had to label you, would you be the ‘creative’ one, the ‘hard working’ one, the ‘Tech-Guru’ or will I have to struggle to put a tag? Also what do you do to promote yourself? There are two parts to this – finding the ‘thing’ to brand and then go about branding it. Let’s talk about the first bit.
I have spoken about finding a specialization before and as time goes by, marketing yourself is going to be important no matter how much you hate it.
There are two easy ways to deal with this (Well, not really easy):
- Work hard at acing at a skill
- Be the smartest person in the room for a particular skill
The first is pretty straightforward. Some people are the perfect solution providers when you have to deal with say, assessment centers. This of course involves intense study and experience. There isn’t a short cut to being the smartest one across rooms.
On the other hand, you could aim to just be the smartest one in the room. This isn’t necessary the easier option. This would involve smartly assessing the needs of a team you move into and working to get to be the ‘go-to’ solution provider for an area of interest. Over time you will of course gather a lot of useful expertise and will always have to account for smarter people stepping into the team.
Or, you could do something radically different and tell me about it!
The HR Business Partner Story 