Are you building and managing your Personal Brand?
During our careers, we all start out at the bottom - spending time in an entry level position where we learn how to be an employee, a practitioner, and a team member. Over time, as we accumulate skills, knowledge, and experience we’ll shift into a manager, an enabler, and a mentor who helps others with what we gained during the early years of our careers. How you share your knowledge, insights, and leadership will eventually become your brand. Whether you consciously cultivate your brand or not, you will eventually get one and being proactive is the best way to build a good one.
The moving parts of a personal brand start with your distinct skills and offerings and are what you’re building during your time in those entry level trenches. Are you building a reputation as an expert penetration tester or as someone who can fix problems? Are you a leader or an innovator? What do people think of when your name comes up? That’s the earliest parts of your brand. From there, begin to bring your own personal style into your branding. Do you have a logo, icon, or color scheme that you want to associate with your messaging, or are you looking to cultivate style through your tone and voice? What personal interests or hobbies do you want to fold in to your brand? For example, Joyce Vance’s newsletter is about her chickens and politics. Once you’ve decided how you want to represent yourself, it’s time to start making your mark.
After you’ve built your expertise and specialization, start cultivating your internal brand. This is how you’re thought of inside the business and can be useful for career growth, getting assignments you want to work on, or finding other people who share common interests. The most personal way to grow internal branding is through mentorship and thought leadership where you can guide more junior team members through informal opportunities, or deliver talks through more formal webinars. Often times, presenting can be daunting and one of the best way to start strengthening that skillset is by being a co-presenter or co-author. Other opportunities to build an internal brand can be knowledge sharing through internal training sessions or by participating in committees that provide strategic guidance to the larger business.
The next step is taking it on the road - External Branding. This is what we come across most often on social media, at conferences, and in the industry at large. A good starting point when planning external branding efforts is figuring out what and how you’re most comfortable sharing your expertise with the larger industry. Not everyone can overcome stage fright and deliver talks, while others really enjoy writing their ideas and sharing longer form texts on blogs or shorter discussions on social media. Newsletter platforms make it easier than ever to reach a personal audience (If you haven’t noticed, I’m partial to Substack). Be professional, insightful, and consistently engaged and after a while, you’ll build a network of peers.
Multiplayer Branding is an option and most people get there through networking in professional groups or communities of interest. These groups will tend to center around individual topics or areas, will cater to professionals in an industry, or do both such as OWASP. Networking has a variety of benefits but can also just be fun if you enjoy talking shop with other people. After a while, you might start getting invitations to work in communities of interest or working groups and can start shaping the larger industry through building and sharing best practices, research, or whitepapers.
Don’t forget to build strong relationships with clients as well. Eventually, after consistently meeting or exceeding expectations, reliably meeting deadlines, and delivering a high quality of work, clients can start to see you as a trusted advisor. If you like the client, that can be a good thing but sometimes may need to be handled with care if not.
After absorbing and contributing to the body of industry knowledge, you may wish to start researching and innovating. Every industry needs people to tread new ground, expand the body of knowledge, and drive the continued evolution - why not you? Start digging into interesting topics that there aren’t good answers for and offer up your own. It could be through informal discussions, empiric experimentation that produces hard data and results, or data driven analysis on existing or new data. Most problems are too big for one person to solve on their own and research often requires collaboration with peers - formally in working groups or informally until the problem is solved.
Finally, continue to grow and adapt. Get feedback from trusted sources. Everyone on the internet has an opinion, but for your own sanity, try to solicit opinions from those you trust and want to learn from. Incorporate that feedback without changing the core of yourself and your brand. Feedback may come in the form of opportunities to explore and grow, or conversations about elements that might not be working. Also, try to keep the core of your brand intact as you move into new areas otherwise you might end up like those who are having to reinvent themselves after investing too much of themselves into bitcoin and other blockchain technologies prior to the crash. If you have a strong enough sense of self, that will keep you flexible without the need for complete re-invention.
Anyway, I hope that this inspired you to start giving back to your peers and the larger industry while getting a little bit of something intangible in return. I wrote this because it’s an article I wish I had read 5-10 years ago as I was growing as a professional. If you’d like to share this with someone you mentor, I’d really appreciate it.
There's always more words to spend on a topic like this one, but I've hit my budget for now. Stay secure, and never forget the humans.