Creating a strong brand for building professional relationships in tech

I want to share my takeaways about creating a strong brand for building professional relationships from a panel talk hosted by Abadesi Osunsade. I’m going to start with what I learned and end with my takeaways.

What I learned

We can use our resume or LinkedIn profile to weave our skills, credentials, culture, and passions into a story. This story's goal is to broadcast our journey and clearly display our next steps. Once we have a story, our primary responsibility is to make it easy for others to find us with content, keywords in LinkedIn/resume, engaging in the community, seeking hiring managers/recruiters, etc.

Everything I just mentioned has to be part of our personal brand. Personal brand is the impression others have of you. We can start creating our personal brand by asking ourselves the following questions:

• What do we want to be known for?
• What are our principles or core values?
• How do we stand out from others or what can we bring to the world?

How do we build a personal brand?

• Consider where you want to be in your journey and find communities to join that are in that space.
• Seek people you have worked with or you know to inquire about groups you should be a part of, how to focus on your strengths, and what should we be doing to stand out. AKA, asking questions and active research.
• Once you find those communities to network/engage, make it a priority to add value to those conversations.
• Invest in yourself (learning, building, writing, helping others).
• A great suggestion is volunteering as it helps you find roles, communities, and opportunities.

A huge part of building a personal brand is sharing with the mindset of being a giver. We can start by sharing in public as someone somewhere doesn't know what we know. As we are engaging with friends, colleagues, and the world with our experiences, we are building a community around us.

My Takeaways

The story my personal brand weaves is my love of developing single purpose software that impacts a community. That purpose is amplified by my core values (simplification and collaboration) and that I contribute to the world by volunteering.

I’ve learned that I need to prioritize finding valuable learning resources, continue learning through passion projects, and sharing my experiences with others. An example is finding a list of UI mockup designs that I can bring to life while building in public.

A new stretch goal is to ask others for guidance based on the type of spaces where people are doing what I desire to do. I understand that to scale my strengths and to stand out, I need to be an active member of those communities by being more intentional in how I engage with others.

I would love to know if others have a takeaway from the material that was shared? But mainly, just wanted to share what I learned.