Building an effective personal brand can bring you many benefits at your workplace; It can increase your status, give you more visibility, open the doors to connect with CXOs, give you opportunities to take your expertise to the next level.

Here are my five tips on how you can share your knowledge to build a personal brand at your workplace.

1. Be a mentor: Start with your immediate environment

Look around you and identify how you can help your colleagues; Do interns/ juniors need to know better working practices/ engineering disciplines? Do your colleagues need to learn new technologies? Do your peers need to improve their soft skills? Once you’ve identified the way(s) you can contribute to your immediate environment, offer help to individuals, organise workshops for groups (i.e. interns). You will impact both your colleagues and your organisation while building credibility as a professional.

2. Share your story: Inspire others with your struggles and victories

You might be an engineer/ manager with an excellent academic background or years of professional experience. You can share your stories at lunch table; Struggles you faced and how you have overcome them? What are the situations you had to make tricky decisions? You will be more recognisable at your workplace by inspiring your colleagues.

3. Be a team player: Encourage others to share their ideas

Never just say ‘I don’t know’ when a colleague asks for your help, instead, you can introduce someone who can help your colleague, find a useful resource from internet and share. Always actively participate in brainstorming sessions/ team meetings to share and connect with colleagues.

4. Blog: Connect with greater audiences

Blogging is one of the best ways to establish your personal brand online. It gives you space to talk about your passions, experiences and to share your expertise. If there is a blog at your workplace start contributing articles and get a higher visibility not only at the workplace but also globally.

5. Organize tech talks/ workshops at your workplace: Establish your presence

Communities are the best platform to connect with experts and establish yourself among them. Actively engage in organising events at the workplace and pushing yourself to speak in front of colleagues will improve your social and communication skills, and you will be identified as an energetic professional.

Article by Dinuka Jayaweera, Editor-in-Chief, IMPACT by IEEE Young Professionals

Tags:personal brandsoft skills