Squiggly Skill Sprint Day 19: Personal Brand

It’s day 19 of the Squiggly Careers sprint, and today’s topic is building your personal brand https://www.amazingif.com/listen/skills-sprint-personal-brand/

This is a topic that I have been ruminating on over the last few weeks, while I have had time to digest the last decade of my career.

It’s also a topic that has some negative & challenging connotations to it, as Sarah expressed on the podcast. It can feel a bit cringeworthy & impersonal to frame yourself in terms of services rendered, a website, or a colour scheme.

I think that the framing in the podcast is a lovely counterpoint to that cringe however, as it suggests the idea of what people say about you when you’re not in the room. I feel very lucky that my recent redundancy led to so many lovely messages from colleagues and ex-colleagues. While I know to take those with a pinch of salt, I also could see some common themes from different people that I could build up a fair picture of how I was viewed. As they say, every cloud has a silver lining.

So that leads to the questions posed in the podcast by Helen and Sarah of “How can I be useful?”, “What do you stand for?”, “Who do you stand with?”, and “What makes you stand out?”.

I’m still working on these questions, but I’m taking steps. Yesterday I was about to do some volunteering at a really valuable voluntary group that helps underrepresented people in tech. So at least in the short term, I can say that I can be useful by offering career advice to people that are having struggles.

For anyone that is interested in that group, either volunteering or having your company host it, it can be found at https://codebar.io/helsinki. Other groups are available in other cities.