As 2021 comes quickly and the job market becomes more uncertain over time, we all must define, improve, and polish our personal brands for the new competitive marketplace. I use the term “marketplace” because I consider us to be sellers first—job candidates second.
We are entering a time when we are not only going to compete with people in our local area for jobs, we are going to compete with the entire world and some of us are already doing that.
The perfect example of this the challenge graphic designers have to break out and get clients when business owners are hiring people on UpWork and Fiverr, and some business owners are even using Canva to fulfill their design needs. Not only are designers in direct competition with freelance platforms—but they are also in direct competition with tools that make certain tasks easier for potential clients to do things on thier own.
So if you were in this situation, what would you need in your arsenal to stand out?
The main tool that you would need to leverage (if you haven’t done so already) is a personal brand. This doesn’t mean that you are just sprucing up your resume and work portfolio, you have to also consider the type of media and content you can create to highlight your skills and services. This means doing the extra work to start a blog, a podcast, or a YouTube channel. The extra work seems like it is unnecessary because in most cases your competition isn’t doing this yet but, that is exactly the reason why you need to start creating content to stand out.
If you need more motivation to get started think about this: you are in direct competition with freelance platforms, other job candidates that are creating content, and potentially, artificial intelligence tools that will change the way you work in the future. We can’t account for all of the changes that will happen in the future but, we can at least try to stand out more by expanding the story we tell to hiring managers.
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