Your personal brand is an insurance policy
personal brand
Do you really need to build a personal brand? Till the eighties, people joined one organization and then retired from the same employer with a retirement gift and a pension. A couple of forces have converged to change that. The result is the fading away of the notion of a steady job. The employment contract between the employer and the employee has got redefined. From a life-time contract, jobs are now more like short-term contracts.What got it started?
Job hopping
Over the last twenty years, businesses have learned to accept that people change jobs. If the employees in the best of organizations face attrition, there is no stigma attached to people switching jobs and even careers.
personal brand
People have quit successful careers to become freelancers, entrepreneurs and pursue creative professions. In the job market, other things being equal, the candidate with a powerful personal brand
Shorter life of a firm
McKinsey believes that, by 2027, 75% of the companies quoted on the S&P 500 even say in 2016, will have disappeared. The average lifespan of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. That means individuals will need to find ways to be employed by different employers during the course of their career. A strong person brand makes a candidate even more attractive to a potential employer. The candidate is often headhunted directly.
New models of employment
personal brand
Uber and Ola showed that a business can have thousands of people working on their platform without there being an employer employee relationship. Not having these drivers as employees means that the employer can stay flexible even when demand is sluggish. This flex staffing model has moved from blue-collar jobs to white collar jobs. The TaaS (Talent as a Service) model is a flexible workforce framework that allows enterprises to access high-quality technology talent on-demand from anywhere in the world. It enables organizations to scale up quickly. A powerful personal brand makes a person stand out among the peers.If you are a freelancer or a gig worker, having a strong personal brand is the predictor of success. How is a gig worker different from a freelancer or a gig artiste? Listen to this podcast for a quick take on the key differences.
The impact of these three forces pales in comparison to the impact of Covid-19 in the job market. Millions of people have lost their jobs. People realize that their business card can no longer borrow the brand value of their employer. Even if the employer provides outplacement services (like RiseSmart) to the impacted employee, without a strong personal brand, the person is just another resume in the pile. Without a personal brand, an individual gets lost among the 650 million people on LinkedIn. The best time to build your personal brand is when you do not need to. Brand building is a long-term process. Today is the best day to start investing in building your personal brand. Get started.--------
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