Personal Branding: Skills to Compete With Peers & Climb the Career Ladder

BEIJING – On July 27th, I was delighted to deliver a professional-development training to the Beijing Women’s Network, entitled Build Your Brand! Skills & Strategies to Boost Your Professional Confidence, Marketability & Climb the Career Ladder.

During this Saturday-morning event, I drew upon so many of my lessons-learned as a foreign freelance journalist, over the past 25 years – and applied to their professional hopes and dreams. Starting with why we should view our challenge in terms of Strategic Communications.

As I explained to the BWN membership – on this occasion, a blend of 30 Chinese and foreign participants, who live and work in Beijing – each of us is a “brand”: offering our own products or services, to a marketplace of consumers.

Whether we plan to return home and blaze a new trail, or to stay in China and chart a new course, we face the same challenge as everyone else: How can I stand out from the competition? How to smartly build my brand? How to confidently sell my brand?

We're all predisposed to tell an employer (or investor/donor/supporter, etc.) how good we are. Even to suggest that we're the "ideal" candidate. That’s human nature. Beyond the lofty words, can we truly prove our comparative advantage and value added – to persuade our smart-but-skeptical audience, as to why they should choose us? (Comparative advantage: What distinguishes us from others. Value added: How we benefit others.)

Don’t underestimate this challenge. It’s actually one of the highest forms of Interpersonal Communications: how to influence any audience's behavior, to achieve our own objective. Moreover, since most of us work in an international environment in China – the world’s second-largest economy – we typically aim to influence a foreign audience. That hoists our challenge to an even higher level: International Communications.

A unique challenge requires a unique solution. And one such solution, I (immodestly) told them, is The MJ Method – my own collection of strategic-communications skills and strategies, which I adapt and apply to all my written and verbal communications.

Then, I made the case for a specific kind of self-marketing and salesmanship: Evidence-Based Branding. Some consider these soft skills, but I view them as professional “survival skills” – which we’ll need the rest of our life. After all, tomorrow you could lose your job. Then what?

Just imagine all that competition out there: they may more talented, less talented, or just as talented. How do I show, not tell, that I’m truly good at what I do? This is more than just professional references or recommendations from a previous boss, which distorts the reality. (After all, you’d only ask for one from someone who has something good to say about you.)

Providing evidence is also more meaningful that mere testimonials, which can also distort the reality. Likewise, it can also be too superficial, as it only tells one aspect. It doesn’t show it. What I’m talking about are more persuasive forms of evidence. Even if it means us writing up case-studies, that can “bring to life” that entire valuable experience. (As I'm doing, here!)

Even if someone doesn’t read what you’ve written, I believe there’s also psychological value to its mere existence. You write it, then supply your audience with Internet links to that content. That builds your own credibility – and their trust in you.

From there, I described for participants how I learned all of this for myself, shared my various skills and strategies, and walked them through how to apply it all to their own career goals today.

Including, how to hammer out effective messages about yourself; how to support them with persuasive evidence from your past; how create fresh evidence, moving forward; and how to weave it all together, into storytelling that "humanizes" you.

As you can see from the photos, they were quite a receptive audience. I look forward to the next opportunity to meet them: specifically, at my Writing-for-Branding Workshop.

If you yourself are curious to learn more, feel free to contact me!