CEO, Advantage Talent, Inc. a Culture, Engagement, Career Data Science Company/WomenTech Network Global Ambassador/Keynote Speaker/Author
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Personal brand safety, protecting the way people and algorithms feel about your brand, is important on multiple levels, but first and foremost from a career safety perspective.
Talent professionals are already seeing the consequences of people not paying attention to their personal brand safety. The most significant risk area is the LinkedIn algorithms that are continually updating and giving the hiring decision-makers feedback in terms of your personal brand reputation, including how you compare to your peers. If you are a professional who does not have a combination of soft skills and hard skills that match with the reality of demanding hybrid jobs and super jobs, you are likely being overlooked.
Why will a lack of reskilling continue to harm your personal brand safety and career prospects?
As companies continue to move toward a new digital era of work, the skills gap continues to grow across the workforce, which means most professionals’ personal brand safety continues to be threatened. To give you an idea of the extent of danger to most people’s personal brand safety, take a look at some of these staggering statistics on skill gaps and the impact of technology on jobs:
• According to the World Economic Forum, a "reskilling revolution" will require investment, but the private sector in the United States could only profitably retrain 25% of the workforce.
• The manufacturing skills gap of employees who aren't trained in advanced technology could have a damaging $2.5 trillion impact on the U.S. economy over the next decade.
• According to a recent Brookings Institute study, artificial intelligence will be a significant factor in the future work lives of managers, supervisors and analysts, shaking up all sorts of white-collar work, from law firms and marketing agencies to publishing and computer programming.
Is your personal branding an interruption?
Offline professional networking has gone online. Right now, you cannot guarantee that hiring managers, your customers and your clients are going to be exposed to high-quality information about you — or any information at all. A lack of personal brand safety can hold you back from achieving the full benefits of what digital technology and social media, especially LinkedIn, can do for your professional success.
Context and relevance are what keep your resume and your public social media profiles, posts, videos and articles from being an annoying interruption on social media.
Even though we now know more about our peers, clients and available jobs than ever before, the nature of most content generated is still an interruption to gain attention. Professionals must make that interruption worth the intrusion. Or they risk harming or devaluing their personal brand. By the same token, professionals who self-report incomplete, inaccurate or irrelevant information on LinkedIn have threatened everyone's ability to bring offline networking online in an authentic and trustworthy way. High-value networking is not an interruption but rather worth the intrusion and investment of time.
What is the most significant risk to your personal brand safety?
The biggest risk lies in not understanding that the nature of networking has changed. Online networking has become more about collaboration and less about trying to stand out as an expert. According to LinkedIn, the top five in-demand soft skills for 2020 are creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability and emotional intelligence. Furthermore, in response to the Covid-19 crisis, the theme for the 2021 World Economic Forum is the Great Reset. As corporations, organizations, nonprofits, educational institutions and governmental agencies pivot to looking for leaders who collaborate, your networking style online must also change to focus on collaboration around solving strategic problems, empowering all stakeholders and an “in it together” attitude.
How can you improve your personal brand safety?
There are three steps.
1. Embrace reskilling.
The first issue that needs addressing is the increase in the outsourcing of personal brand safety and careers to professionals who are not authorities on career management. Instead of reskilling, many professionals continue to hire personal branders, story branders and marketers to put “lipstick on irrelevance” instead of hiring these experts further along in the process when they have high-quality personal brands worth promoting.
The World Economic Forum collaborated with LinkedIn, Coursera and Burning Glass Technologies to map seven emerging professional clusters that leaders should focus on:
• Care professions.
• Data and AI.
• Engineering and cloud computing.
• Green professions.
• Digital and data-driven marketing, sales and content.
• People and culture.
• Product development.
2. Practice Google's EAT philosophy.
EAT relates to the Google algorithm and is used to assess the expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness of a piece of content. Currently, LinkedIn users are inconsistent about delivering high-value EAT content. Eventually, this individualized approach will erode the value of the ecosystem for the majority of the stakeholders to the point that the hiring managers, peers, prospects and customers that you are trying to make meaningful connections with will stop viewing the network as valuable. So, the best way to gain trust online as someone worth networking and collaborating with is to exhibit your expertise, authority and trustworthiness. Ask yourself:
• Compared to others in the network, would outsiders consider you an expert in collaborating and solving strategic global issues?
• Have your past collaborations been trustworthy, making you an authority?
• Looking at your personal brand, are you a trustworthy collaborator?
3. Activate a learner's mindset.
Philosopher Eric Hoffer is credited with saying, “In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists.” Make learning a priority, and block off time in your calendar. I suggest using the five-hour rule framework.
Your personal brand safety depends on you reskilling your soft and hard skills today so that the algorithms and people don’t permanently cancel you out tomorrow. Be relevant, not an annoying interruption.
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