personal brand

How to Use Personal Branding to Build Your Engineering Career

May 30, 2022 By EMI

This is a guest post by Tiffani Teachey

Building a successful career as an engineer is essential to establishing yourself as a credible expert in your field. One of the best ways to do this is through personal branding. By creating a solid personal brand, you can make yourself visible and recognizable within your industry, which can help you stand out from the competition and lead to more excellent opportunities for advancement. If you’re looking to build your engineering career, using personal branding is a strategy you should consider!

This post will discuss how personal branding can help engineers reach their career goals. We’ll also provide tips on how to get started with personal branding. So, if you’re ready to take your engineering career to the next level, keep reading!

“You can be sure others do it for you if you’re not branding yourself.” ~ Unknown

Here are three ways to use personal branding to build your engineering career:

The Power of a Personal Brand for Engineering Managers

May 9, 2022 By EMI

This is a guest post by Patrick Sweet, P.Eng., MBA, PMP, CSEP

Whether you realize it or not, you have a brand. This may come as a surprise to you. After all, you’re an engineering manager, and not some sort of company or a product. But it’s true. In fact, everyone has a brand. Everyone is known for something among their friends and colleagues. The real question is not so much whether you have a brand but rather what it is, whether you’re managing it, and whether you’re taking advantage of it in your career.

Back to Basics: What Is a Brand?

The best way to think of a brand is that it’s a summary of who you are, what you do, and what you believe in. In other words, your brand is the shorthand way the world thinks about you.

In the business world, brands are manicured and managed with precision. Volvo, for instance, prides itself on making some of the safest cars in the world, and they promote that fact about themselves. They want to be known as the “safe car” company in the minds of their customers and potential customers. Walmart, on the other hand, has a strong brand tied to saving people money. Both are very different, but very strong brands.

To help brands stick in the minds of their customers, companies use things like logos, slogans, jingles, color pallets, fonts, and many other devices to communicate their brand.

Branding is incredibly important when it comes to positioning a company. It makes it easier for a customer to link an organization or product to a need they have. The easier it is to make that link, the more likely the customer will chose a particular solution.

The Power of Branding for Individuals

Personal Brand: What Is It and Why Is It Important?

April 25, 2022 By EMI

This is a guest post by Gabe Lett, FSMPS, CPSM, LPC

A personal brand is the perception a person has of you. Rather than the overall perception of a company, a personal brand is specific to you as an employee of your company. The reason for the elevation of personal branding has to do with the digital capabilities of social media and the ease of building a personal business network that spans geographies. The better you establish your personal brand, the more opportunities you bring to your company.

What Ingredients Make a Personal Brand?

A brand is simply the total experience people have when interacting with a company. What people feel and experience when they interact with a product or service makes its brand. Therefore, a personal brand is made from:

Interaction with you personally
Experience of you personally
The emotion elicited when interacting with you and experiencing you personally

Developing a Personal Brand as the Jack of All Trades

June 7, 2021 By EMI

This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee

At some point in your career or during your job search, you must have been asked the famous interview question, “Tell me about yourself.” If you often respond to such questions with “I’m great at solving problems” or “I’m a good leader who others can depend on in all situations,” this article will help you better understand and developing your personal brand so that you can send the right message to those who are considering you for a job or make a strong impression on those who are meeting you for the first time.

Being the “Jack or Jill of all trades” does not automatically make you “master of none,” although in most cases, it’s unlikely that you’re an expert in one particular area. But that’s what makes you unique, and you can be among the most valuable members of your team or company. And this begins with you taking full ownership of your unique position, and clearly brand yourself as one who is approachable and resourceful.

Find Your Genius Zone: The Ultimate Personal Brand

May 10, 2021 By EMI

This is a blog by Jeff Perry, MBA

Personal branding is getting more and more attention as a piece of building our careers, yet many people ignore it or do not even know what it is. Whether you do it intentionally or not, you are putting off a personal brand — but is it the one that you want to have?

Let us dive deeper into how you can take charge and help others perceive you in the way you want to be known.

What Is a Personal Brand?

Put simply, a personal brand is how you promote yourself. It’s the amount of “who you are” that you allow the world to see. It’s your opportunity to tell your story and differentiate yourself from others.

An easy way to think about a personal brand is to imagine a simple Venn diagram. In one circle are all of the attributes, skills, personality traits, interests, and experiences that you have. In the other circle are all of the ways you show that to other people — online, in a resume, on LinkedIn, personal websites, and more. The intersection of the two circles is your personal brand — how much people actually see of who you truly are.

Overcoming Resistance When Developing Your Personal Brand

May 26, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Jamie Buck

In this article, I’d like to discuss how I stumbled onto the path of personal branding by identifying my area of expertise. By sharing this story, I hope you are able to take a few shortcuts to finding your own path to personal branding.

First, why are personal branding and expertise important?

Personal branding is a way to differentiate yourself from the crowd, a time-tested cornerstone of career development. Additionally, it invites conversation with like-minded folks.
Developing expertise is essential to personal branding. It may be subjective but can be seen as a skill that adds additional value. You may ask, don’t we all have expertise? Well, yes and no. To the outside world, a discipline (such as engineering) may be seen to have a level of expertise, but within the bounds of that discipline, at best, it can be a level playing field unless you actively build your expertise.

TECC 145: How to Create a Winning Strategy for an Engineering Career of Success

March 21, 2017 By EMI

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

In this episode, Chris Knutson, PE interviews Nader Mowlaee on how to create a winning strategy to build a successful engineering career. They hit on why, and how, to establish your own personal brand and they also dive into core skills development and their importance to engineers, as well as the importance of building and cultivating a network.