Personal Branding is NOT Career Management
It’s easy to think you’re managing your career because you know about personal branding. Of course you do, personal branding is all the rage right now with countless blogs telling us what a personal brand is, why we need to have one, and how to manage our own.
With so much valuable information on personal brands in book and blogs, don’t lose the forest for the trees.
Personal branding ≠ career management. I repeat, personal branding by itself is NOT managing your career.
Then what is career management? It’s more than the image you project, the way you speak, or the unique value you provide your employer.
It’s a process that includes several steps in career analysis, career strategy, career planning, job execution, and on-going career support.
Personal branding pertains to only two aspects of career management, as we define our brand during the initial stage of launching our career, outline our personal brand roadmap, and perform on-going monitoring or evolution of our brand.
I love reading and writing about personal brands as much as other blogs, but the Smart Lemming’s mission is to provide information that allows you to proactively manage your career rather than letting your career happen to you.
I’ll address each step in the Smart Lemming’s Career Management Framework in upcoming posts. In the meantime, reflect if you:
- Have the right information to make educated decisions about your next job opportunity
- Have a strategy and plan to get the job you want
- Know how to hit the ground running in your new job by quickly adding value, or
- Are supported with trusted advisers like your mentors, coach, friends and family, and network