Nothing happens by accident. You must have a vision of yourself and of where you want to be in order for anything to happen. If you don’t, you probably aren’t ready, or you don’t know that you have to be proactive and always thinking about what your next move should be.

Ask Three Basic Questions
It all comes down to three questions:

1. What do you want to be?: Your brand.
2. What do you want to do?: Your job or career.
3. Where do you want to be?: Stay at the same company, take time off, find a new company, or work for yourself.

Fortunately, I’ve always thought in terms of these three questions. Once I nail down my vision, I figure out my objectives, identify my targets to achieve, and create an action plan on how to execute. The roadmap below is example of this process.

Me-Too, Market Challenger, and Thought Leader
Your personal branding roadmap schedules your targeted new skills across time. Below is an explanation of how the roadmap is designed:

• Roadmap coordinates release versions and market differentiation on x-axis and y-axis
• X-axis: release version numbering follows the “major” and “minor” career development items per year
• Y-axis: market differentiation from a “me-too” offering to “thought leader” position

For example, if you want to learn how to perform a business case analysis this quarter because coworkers know how to do this, but you do not, then you would include it in the bottom left quadrant. To download the SmartLemming.com Personal Branding template, click here.

Vision, Objectives, Measures, Results
You might identify skills that you want to pick up in all the major areas: analytic, planning, creative, and strategic. Being balanced in these four areas is the perfect skill set, but be an expert by mastering something in one of these areas. It will most likely be the thing you love to do. Then, I would figure out my time frame for learning these new skills. After that, I’d identify when I think I’d like to accomplish those skills across 2006. A specific action plan might be:

• Buy X books by X date.
• Read and study 10 books by June 20, 2009.
• Meet with my manager by July 1, 2009, asking if there are any tasks or projects that you might be assigned to so you can try these skills out under supervision and hopefully being coached by your manager.
• Start the project and determine an appropriate deadline.
• Complete project by deadline.
• Schedule meeting with manager for feedback and integrate feeback to many any changes or improvements to project and/or your understanding of the new skill sets.

I know this isn’t rocket science. I’m mostly recommending a framework that’s easy to remember. Unfortunately, you’ll never get there from here unless you know what you want to become, see how you want it to turn out, set your goals/target to measure your progress and success, and the create the action plan of tasks with deadlines on how to get there.

Recommended Download

• Smart Lemming Personal Branding Roadmap template

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