Building a recognisable personal brand can help to open up professional opportunities. If you’re looking for a job, you want your potential manager at your ideal organisation to associate your personal brand with something they need on their team. Here are some ideas to help you to achieve this:

1. Understand yourself and how you’re perceived

Gaining a clearer idea about your abilities, interests and motivations will help you create a narrative about yourself. You can use the self-assessment tools on our website, to help you gain greater clarity about your personality type, skills and strengths. You could also ask some friends or people that know you to write down three things that describe you; patterns usually emerge from this process which can help you understand yourself better.

2. Create a vision for your future

Think about where you want to be in five, 10 or even 20 years’ time and what you would like to be known for. Consider the elements in life that would make you happy and the things that would bring you satisfaction in your career.

3. Develop your personal story

Bring together the information about your abilities, interests and motivations with your experiences in life so far, putting things together in a way that leads to your vision for the future. If you have many different passions or areas of interest, a narrative becomes even more crucial to pull things together into a unified theme. Though your personal brand may be an idealised version of who you are, it should still be authentic. The process of developing a personal brand is really a way of collecting the parts of yourself you want to show the world and organising them in a way that’s unique to you.

4. Manage your online presence and be purposeful in what you share

With social media tools, blogs, and mobile applications, there are endless opportunities to become known and connect with other people. If you haven’t done so, build your profile on LinkedIn – it’s an obvious place for employers to find out about you. Be mindful that every tweet you send, every status update you make, every picture you share, contributes to your personal brand. Think about how you can add value rather than just generating content for the sake of it. Once you understand how you want your brand to be perceived, you can start to be much more strategic about your personal brand. It’s worth checking out our recent blog on using social media to build on your personal brand too.

5. Adaptability is key

It’s rare these days to spend your whole life in one career. Just as companies are constantly refreshing and reinventing their brands, it’s important for you to keep your personal brand up to date and aligned with your professional development and changing circumstances.

If you’d like further help with personal branding, come and make use of the LSE Careers Resource Centre or book a one-to-one appointment with a Careers Consultant to discuss this or any career-related topic. Remember we’re open all summer as well so make the most of us!