7 Benefits Of Personal Branding For Architecture, Engineering And Construction Professionals
In today’s highly-connected world, people are able to form an initial opinion of you with as little as a quick Google search. Your social media profiles – both their existence (or non-existence) – and the content you share all go a long way toward shaping others’ opinions of you.
However, it isn’t just your digital presence that effects your personal brand, nor is personal branding simply about making a good first impression.
Your personal brand plays a critical role at every stage of relationship. It evolves every time someone interacts with you. This could be through a direct conversation, or when they discover something you’ve created, or when they learn something good or bad about you.
This is true both online and off.
If you want to guide others’ opinions of you in a positive direction, you’re going to need to take personal branding seriously.
It’s our goal to help you succeed.
In this article we’ll be discussing what a personal brand is, why it’s important, and the 7 benefits AEC professionals can experience as a result of their personal branding efforts.
Introduction To Personal Branding
What Is Personal Branding?
When first encountered, the term “personal brand” can stir up all kinds of thoughts in the minds of professionals who have just been told that their personal brand will play a key role in the advancement of their career.
Are you supposed to get a website? Are you trying to become famous?
To avoid getting carried away, and in order to make sure we’re on the same page about what we’re discussing, let’s consider the following, straightforward definition:
Your personal brand is how others perceive you.
Or even more concisely:
Your personal brand is your reputation.
The implications of these two simple definitions of your personal brand is that everyone already has one.
And it’s true – everyone does already have one. Even you.
Whether you’ve been actively developing it, or neglecting your personal brand by leaving your reputation up to chance, you’ve already been creating perceptions of yourself in the minds of those who have engaged with you, your work, or your ideas.
The act of personal branding, then, is putting intentional effort toward influencing your personal brand in a positive direction, so that you are more favorably perceived by others – especially those with the ability to contribute to your career advancement.
Personal branding is not about projecting a false image of someone who you’re not.
Fake brands don’t last.
Eventually, people will see through your façade and look to someone who can back up their claims with evidence.
Effective personal branding involves making sure that your real, positive qualities and accomplishments are clearly seen by others and continuously strengthened over time.
This will enable you to be seen as the go-to expert in your area of expertise. This is a key factor in influencing your perceived value to others and serves as the foundation for your success.
If you feel like your current skills, experience and expertise aren’t worth promoting, don’t let that stop you.
You can focus on elevating as you develop your personal brand to increase your confidence, but more than likely you’re simply underestimating the value you already have to offer.
Why Is Personal Branding Important?
Your colleagues, clients, boss, friends, competitors, fans, and anyone else have already formed an opinion about you based on how your existing personal brand presents you.
Given the presence and influence you can have over your personal brand – and its extreme importance in the advancement of your career – there’s no reason for you to leave it in the hands of others.
Remember, every time someone engages with you in any way, they’re constructing and modifying their perception of you.
This applies to every area of your life.
Personal branding will help you take control of how the people you interact with perceive you, while helping you perceive yourself more positively as well.
Leveraging your personal branding will also help you succeed in career-critical performance reviews, enabling you to better position yourself for a raise or promotion.
If you want people to perceive you as someone who is impactful – someone who brings significant value to the table – you have to be strategic and proactive in creating that positive perception within them.
Personal Branding Requires Proactive Effort
It’s no longer enough to work hard, sit back, and expect recognition and promotion for a job well done. Instead, it’s your responsibility to be proactive in raising your value in the eyes of your clients, superiors, colleagues, and staff.
Proactive personal branding enables you to intentionally position yourself to achieve your career goals by consistently maintaining others’ awareness of your value.
You should not use personal branding to create an exaggerated identity or a misleading persona of yourself (long-term success always depends on real results).
Instead, actively and consciously make decisions and take action that will result in others perceiving a full and accurate representation of your value.
The best leaders differentiate themselves by building a personal brand and reputation that creates a desire in their employers to reward them, their employees to contribute to their mission, and their customers and clients to continue to do business with them.
7 Benefits Of Personal Branding For Architecture, Engineering And Construction Professionals
Now that you understand what personal branding is and why it’s important, it’s time to dive deeper into the practical benefits of personal branding. For each of the 7 items on this list, we’ve provided a detailed explanation of how each benefit is directly made possible by your personal branding efforts.
To kick things off, let’s begin by discussing how personal branding can help you accelerate your career.
Benefit 1 – Career Acceleration
The resulting career benefits are the primary reason people pursue personal branding. It allows you to make your value known, differentiate yourself from others, and gain access to more and better opportunities. As a result, you’ll gain more control over your career trajectory and speed of progression.
Personal branding will help you accelerate your career in the following 4 ways:
The People Who Need To Know Your Value Will Know It
If the people with the ability to hire you, promote you, or assign you to a desired project don’t understand what you have to offer, they’re not going to have any reason to choose you over the other candidates they’re considering for the role.
In fact, a large part of your career success depends on your ability to make certain that the right people are aware of your talents, insights and work ethic. If you can build a strong personal brand, and communicate it to the right people, you’ll put yourself in a great position to advance your career.
You’ll Stand Out From The Crowd
The last thing a career-savvy professional wants to do is blend in. They understand the importance of differentiating themselves from others.
If you want to accelerate your career advancement, you’ll need to take this seriously as well.
If an employer or client views you as no different than the other candidates, your chance at securing the role or project you’re seeking will be similar to those of winning a lottery. Instead, if you can stand out as being different from their other options, you’ll amplify your likelihood of being chosen from the pool of candidates.
One of the best ways to stand out from the crowd is to be yourself and to allow appropriate aspects of your character and personality to shine through into your work and professional interactions.
You’ll Be Considered For More Opportunities
The more you stand out as an expert, the more people will want you on their team. This will result in you being considered for more opportunities.
When you only have one option, you have to take it, or wait for something else. If instead, you have several opportunities to choose from, you’ll be able to choose which ones you truly want to pursue. This ability to be selective is the proverbial sail that enables you to steer your career in the direction that you want it to go.
You’ll Be Considered For Positions Of Higher Responsibility
People want to know that high-value, important work is going to get done right. They’re not just going to give the task to anyone. They need to believe in the person they’re handing the responsibility to.
If you want that person to be you, developing a strong personal brand can go a long way to putting their mind at ease and developing an excitement within them to have you execute or oversee the project on their behalf.
Benefit 2 – Increased Trust
Developing trust is critical to your success. In fact, it will be almost impossible to succeed without it.
Your goal should be to help others feel confident in your ability to get things done and to position yourself as an authority who they can trust. Personal branding will help build that trust in the following 2 ways:
People Will Know What They’re Signing Up For When They Work With You
As a result of your personal branding efforts, people will already be familiar with you when you approach them or when they consider approaching you. This will save you the time of warming them up as the relationship will have already been established ahead of time.
Any competition with weak personal brands will have to start from zero in order to get to the same point.
Part of your personal branding message should be to sharing the type of work you do and what others can expect when they choose to work with you. This helps remove the guesswork and investigation they would otherwise have to do when assessing if they might want to work with you.
You’ll Be Seen As An Expert
We all see the value in a specialist. We would all rather have heart surgery performed by a heart-surgeon than by a GP. The same can be said when someone is considering hiring or contracting someone in your area of focus.
Applying this concept of a specialty to your personal branding efforts will allow you to become the go-to person in your area of expertise. Establishing yourself as an expert at what you do will go a long way toward helping prospective clients and employers trust your abilities.
Benefit 3 – Increased Personal Confidence
Confidence enables you to take action and step out of your comfort zone. The natural result of these activities is growth, increased competence, and yes, even greater confidence in yourself to take bigger actions in the future.
Personal branding will increase your personal confidence in the following 2 ways:
You’ll Collect Evidence Of Your Competence
A personal brand demands that you convey the value you bring to others. You can only do this if you’re aware of your achievements for yourself.
As you compile a list of your accomplishments and accolades, you’ll be reminded of all that you’ve been able to accomplish on behalf of your employer and for your clients.
This can help you feel far more prepared when a new opportunity does arise, and will make it that much easier for you to justify why you’re the best candidate for the role.
You’ll Become More Comfortable Expressing Your Unique Value
Everybody wants to talk about how valuable they are, but almost all of them are all saying the exact same things.
The only way to truly stand out is to add some of your own unique characteristics to the mix.
Consider where in your past projects and roles you’ve been able to accomplish more or better results for reasons unique to you, or at least reasons not commonly held by the majority of your colleagues.
This could include a combination of past work histories, insights from hobbies you pursue, or perspective from topics you’re interested in.
Benefit 4 – Increased Motivation
Motivation can be the difference between waking up every morning excited about the day ahead or waking up and wishing you’d chosen a different career.
When you’re motivated, everything becomes easier. You don’t have to fight against yourself to get to work, instead, you look forward to it with anticipation.
Personal branding will increase your motivation in the following 2 ways:
You’ll Be On A Mission
If you truly desire to build a strong personal brand you’ll need to work toward something meaningful.
Often, the concept of a mission tends to elicit thoughts of some world-changing goal with massive impact, but this isn’t necessarily helpful. Unless you’re truly in a position to make your world-changing goal into a reality, you’ll probably want to tone it down a bit.
Instead of something high and lofty, your mission can simply be to get to a point in your career where you and your family don’t have to worry about your finances. You could also tie it to a career milestone, like securing a management position where you’re supervising a team of people and overseeing the work rather than doing it.
At some point, when you achieve these initial missions focused on your own interests, you’ll naturally expand out to further-reaching missions that will impact others outside of yourself. All throughout the journey, the various missions you take on will serve as rocket fuel for your personal branding efforts.
You’ll Get To Observe Your Progress As You Go
Similar to our earlier point on increasing your confidence by collecting evidence of your competence, actively tracking your progress can also serve to motivate you.
Often, we don’t realize how far we’ve come or how much progress we’re making in life until we look back at where we were one, five, or ten years ago. The same can be said for our careers.
By focusing on building your personal brand, you’ll naturally become far more aware of the progress you’ve been making and find it even easier to keep going.
Benefit 5 – Improved Sense Of Direction
No one wants to feel like they’re wandering aimlessly. We all desire to learn and grow. Of course, to do so most effectively you’ll want to ensure you’re learning and growing in the right areas.
This can be done by gaining a clear idea of where you’ve come from and where you’re going.
Personal branding will give you a sense of direction in the following 2 ways:
You’ll Develop A Specialty
If you’re trying to build a strong personal brand, you’re not going to want to try to specialize in “anything and everything”. Instead, you’re going to want to pick one to three related areas of focus where you can establish yourself as a standout expert.
As you do this, you’ll identify and confirm which aspects of your industry and work you enjoy, and which ones you’d like to be less involved in. You can then leverage your personal brand to move you in the direction you want to go, further cementing your mastery of your chosen specialty.
You’ll Achieve More By Focusing Your Efforts
As you determine the correct path to pursue, you’ll be able to turn your efforts away from distractions and focus them on key career-driving and brand-building areas of focus. If you try to be everything to everyone you’ll quickly become no one to anybody.
By focusing your full effort in one area you’ll be able to expedite the development of your expertise and reach your goals faster. This is the best way to quickly become the go-to person in your field and sets you on a path where you can leave a meaningful and lasting legacy.
Benefit 6 – Stronger Professional Relationships
Strong professional relationships form the groundwork for long-term career success. The stronger the relationships you forge, the more loyalty, referrals, and overall profitability you’ll experience.
Personal branding will strengthen your professional relationships for the following 2 reasons:
People Like To Be Associated With Experts
Experts tend to gain a following within their industry. People are eager to hear what they have to say.
However, even experts rarely gain a following without a conscious effort. Their success comes from actively seeking ways to share their expertise, add value to their community, and build their personal brand.
As a result, these experts develop strong networks of individuals within their industry which they can leverage through shared insights, collaborations, and word-of-mouth referrals.
If you want to get ahead in your career, you’ll also want to leverage personal branding to establish yourself as an expert in your industry of focus.
By Standing For Something, Others Will Want To Stand With You
Another way to grow your network of professional relationships is to take the role of a thought leader in your industry. If there’s something you feel your industry could be doing better, voice it.
There’s a good chance others also hold your viewpoint and will want to rally together with you.
This not only helps you to bring about the change you desire to see in your industry, it also creates strong connections with like-minded professionals who may find opportunities to help you advance your career.
Benefit 7 – A More Impactful Legacy
Your legacy is more than just the wealth you leave behind when you die. Your true legacy is the cumulative sum of the impact you make on the world throughout your entire life.
This can include making important contributions that drive your industry forward, offering a hand to those behind you on the journey, and serving in causes that you’re passionate about.
Personal branding will help you create a more impactful legacy in the following 2 ways:
You Will Take Actions That Will Leave An Impact
If you’re not concerned with your personal brand, building trust, or advancing your career, you’re very likely going to keep playing things safe. Unfortunately, playing things safe is not a recipe for an impactful legacy.
If instead, you take your career and personal brand seriously, you’re going to naturally be taking actions that leave a greater impact in the world. You’re going to seek more significant projects, work with more innovative people, and secure more valuable roles which are highly profitable due to the impact they create in the world.
You’ll Activate The Compounding Effects Of A Personal Brand
Your personal brand is so much more than a resume. When you stay focused and proactive in a discipline for multiple years, you amass insights and experience that few others can match. The longer you stay focused and continue to establish yourself as an expert in a specific area, the more these benefits compound.
As a reward for your efforts, you’ll become increasingly desirable for higher-level, higher-responsibility positions, and over time it’s very likely you’ll be asked to consult in your area of expertise solely as a result of having established yourself as someone who truly knows their stuff.
Final Thoughts
Remember, your brand – your reputation – will never leave you.
You have to be in control of it – not simply maintaining it, but actively growing and building upon it.
This isn’t something that someone else can do for you – and neglecting it can be disastrous.
You need to own it.
By embracing personal branding as an individual promotion strategy, you’ll be able to strategically position yourself to receive the discovery, recognition, profitable business, and promotion you desire by raising your value in the minds of your clients, staff, colleagues, and superiors.
Here are four ways to take action right now to improve your personal brand:
- Conduct an honest self-assessment of your existing personal brand.
- Begin viewing yourself as a ‘product’, rather than just an employee.
- Determine the ‘Why’ of your personal brand and begin to work from it.
- Identify and overcome any fear and self-limiting beliefs that are holding you back.
Think about where you are right now in your career.
You are where you are as a result of previous choices you’ve made.
At some point, you decided which career you wanted to pursue, and determined the path you needed to take to get there. As you progressed through your career, you likely sought out additional opportunities for continued growth and development.
You should approach the development of your personal brand in the same way.
Next Steps
If you’d like to dive much deeper into personal branding and our You As The Product© framework, we invite you to consider investing in a membership to Growth Through Learning Academy, where you’ll gain access to our full Personal Branding course.
The course will take your understanding of personal branding to the next level with insightful video lessons, quizzes, and exercises all designed to increase your confidence and take your career to new heights.
Sign up for the Academy today and receive instant access to our entire library of courses on consultative sales, business development, personal branding, and priority management.