Your Talent Value as a Personal Brand

Your Talent Value as a Personal Brand

For young professionals at the start of their career, their talents and potentials may go unrecognized, as they are yet to learn and experience how to effectively communicate their skills and abilities. To overcome this barrier, start with developing a strong personal brand and learning how to ‘sell’ it.

Measuring one’s talent value is an exercise in self-discovery. One area to begin in is to ask those who know you well to describe you with three words. This can show how people perceive you and what characteristics of yours tend to stand out. While you may disagree or be unhappy with some, in general, it often happens that you hear things about yourself you already suspected, and the occasional surprising one that may put a smile on your face and be well-worth exploring further. You can take this list and divide it into what you perceive as positive and negative, then rearrange each column from the strongest traits to the weakest. You know have the top positive characteristics you can focus on for your personal brand, and you also have that dreaded characteristic which answers the infamous question: what is your biggest weakness? You no longer have to speculate about it, and you can prepare a strategy for how you see yourself changing and developing this weakness into an eventual strength. This, too, is part of your personal brand – identifying your vulnerability and being proactive about it.

Talent value is also about whom you know and how you can rely on them when needed. In other words, as a young professional, you want to quickly build a network of reliable colleagues. You can start with your classmates from professional studies to everyone you have worked with in the past, and even that odd professor who once thought there was ‘something’ about you… Keep all the people you have had a positive experience within your network, as you never know when they will be able to help you. And make sure you reciprocate, because you will be in other people’s network as well.

With a secure network and a clear set of your positive characteristics, you can now create a description of yourself – about who you are and what you do (or would like to do). Highlight those strong traits that others have seen in you and mention (very briefly) the most positive experience you have had in a previous job (what made it so positive is the key here, not the job or function itself). You want to use the right words that represent you, and not merely a list of generic adjectives that have no meaning in today’s professional world.

Become engaged with the world around you. Contact recruiters personally, send out tailor-made CVs and correctly written motivation letters that again use the right words to emphasise your desire for the job. Do not be afraid to put yourself out there and to share your ideas when possible.

My Personal Brand

I consider myself to have strong values; I am a creative, sensitive, and growth-oriented individual. A career is more than just a job to me because I want to be happy at it and make a positive impact for others and myself. I can write, I am an observer, and I can offer useful advice when it comes to finding solutions. I can communicate and focus on specific tasks when required to. I am compassionate, aware of social injustice and have empathy with those who are treated incorrectly. Others see me as loyal, honest and considerate. I can improve by being more confident, working on my public speaking, and by being more social to new people. Others see my biggest weakness as being too quiet (which makes them think I am unfriendly).

Success to me means finding a balance in life, through friendship, creativity, justice, and making a positive impact on those around me. Recognizing my strengths and weaknesses will help me to develop myself and achieve my goals. I need to pay attention to how I receive and understand the situation, and not just by the way it makes me feel. I need to work on thinking openly and objectively.
Here is my list:
• Strong value system
• Warm interest in people
• Service-oriented
• Loyal and devoted to people and causes
• Future-oriented
• Growth-oriented
• Creative and inspirational
• Flexible and laid back
• Sensitive and complex
• Original and individualistic
• Value deep and authentic relationships
• Want to recognized

Written by Maybeline Whitter for Together Abroad