To finalize our week of visual rhetorics, here is a guest blog post by Kelley Dodge ‘16, who discusses her experience with personal branding in CUPID Studio.
My name is Kelley Dodge, and I am a sophomore English major with a concentration in Professional Writing and Rhetoric. I am also pursuing minors in Business Administration, Professional Sales, and Psychology.
In my CUPID Studio class, we have begun the semester by focusing on the importance of personal branding. While I have heard about the growing importance of creating your own personal brand, I was unaware of how multifaceted a personal brand is – just like individuals are.
Before you begin creating your personal brand in a public domain, it is important to sit down and develop a vision or plan for how you want to present yourself through your brand. While this can be a time commitment, your brand needs to be well thought out as it is something you will continue to build and develop for years to come. This requires evaluating your personality, values, skills, audience, and most importantly, purpose (what you want your brand to accomplish).
After you have developed a vision for your brand, you will need to consider the different domains to promote your brand. For example, you can promote your brand through a resumé, cover letter, portfolio, blog, website, Linkedin profile, Facebook profile, Twitter account, and a variety of other platforms.
In CUPID Studio we are currently working on developing our resumés. While it is important for a resumé to show relevant skills, it is equally as important to showcase your personality, ultimately making yourself sound appealing to a future employer and promoting your personal brand. My resumé began as a plain, black and white list of my educational history, past employment, service projects, etc., but has emerged into a document that is a much better representation of my personal brand. My new resumé utilizes different colors, fonts, and textual layouts that will hopefully help set me apart from other job applicants. While my new resumé showcases my personality and creativity, it is still a professional document that relays my overall vision.
In addition to showcasing your personality, I have begun editing my resumé to include more hard skills, specific abilities that can be defined and measured. These skills give future employers more concrete examples. For example, on my resumé, I originally listed “persuasion” as a skill. However, this is not explicitly defined enough to be appealing to future employers. On the newest version of my resumé, I was able elaborate this “soft” skill of persuasion as “experience with persuasive marketing.” This statement is a “hard” skill because I could explain to future employers different projects I have done that utilize persuasive marketing tactics.
Ultimately, my personal brand is something that will change as my aspirations change and mature throughout my college career. While it is scary to be so undecided about what my future holds, I know that if I stick to my overall vision and create a personal brand that is appealing to a variety of professional audiences, I can tailor it at a later date. I think starting to develop my personal brand at this point in my college career will help set me apart in the future.
For a look at how some very creatively-inclined people developed resumés for specific audiences, look at…http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/inspiration/creative-resume-designs/
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