3 minutes
Crafting a compelling personal brand can help unlock your career potential. Here’s how to get started.
Are you a young female professional eager to stand out in today’s competitive business landscape? Executive coach and leadership development consultant Katie Wiesel has partnered with CUES to offer a new workshop this summer, “Unlock Your Potential: Building Your Personal Brand,” an opportunity to unleash your personal brand’s power and shine like never before.
This workshop is intended to help you develop the skills and confidence to craft a compelling personal brand that resonates with your goals and aspirations. You’ll learn how to articulate your unique value proposition and stand out from the crowd as well as network with other emerging female professionals.
In anticipation of the August workshop, CUES connected with Wiesel to find out just how important a personal brand is for anyone looking to advance their career and how and when to get started.
Q: Why is it important for young professionals to create a personal brand?
Whether we like it or not, we all have reputations that precede us based on what we’ve accomplished, our current performance in our roles, how we treat people and how we generally present ourselves. Each of us already has a personal brand, whether we’ve been intentional in cultivating it or not.
Being intentional is the name of the game here. You can cultivate your reputation by being intentional with your choices. Creating an intentional brand helps you put your best foot forward and take full advantage of career opportunities.
Q: What are some key components or considerations for creating a personal brand?
The core components of personal brand development are understanding your strengths, your values and your habits. The combination of those components is key to being intentional about your personal brand.
Q: When should you create a personal brand? (Is it too late if I’m X age or Y role?)
It’s never too late to evaluate who you’ve been, who you want to be and what you want to achieve. From a professional standpoint, you want to think about your personal brand as soon as you enter the workforce. But even if you’re in the twilight of your career, you can be thoughtful about the reputation you want to cultivate going forward.
Q: Does a personal brand change over time?
Absolutely. Your personal brand can (and almost always does) evolve depending on your goals, values and aspirations. As we gain new experiences, seek different opportunities, achieve new goals, etc., our perspectives change, and our aspirations change along with them. We discover new strengths and passions; even our core values may evolve.
Your personal brand can be defined as “what you want people to think and feel about you when you leave the room.” You should hope this changes as you become more skilled and experienced. If it isn’t changing over time, that’s an indication that things may have been static for too long.
Q: Why did you focus on young professional women for the upcoming CUES workshop?
As an executive coach, I work closely with high-potential, high-performing female leaders and managers across industry, function and geography. In addition to my private practice, I coach in several programs focused on women’s leadership. I recently designed a program, the Young Women’s Professional Development Program, that aims to empower early-career women with skills and tools in decision making, negotiation, self-advocacy and communication.
Katie Wiesel is an executive coach and leadership development consultant. As an ICF accredited coach, Katie works with senior executives and mid-level leaders to realize their potential. Her passion is helping high performers discover what’s possible in their professional and personal lives by creating the habits and behaviors necessary to lead themselves, their teams and their organizations to success. She also integrates the industry insights and leadership development expertise she has gained from 20-plus years of experience at best-in-class programs at UVA/Darden, The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
