Your INC Part 6: Creating Your Personal Brand Roadmap

The first 5 parts of this series focused on the behind-the-scenes work regarding your personal brand. The second half of this series will focus on how to use your personal brand to achieve your career goals.

Your Personal Brand Roadmap

Think of the last time you put an address in your GPS. You had your start point, your end point, and probably a couple of different routes for you to select from. It probably showed you things that would slow you down, like roadwork and traffic congestion. It also showed you how long each route would take.Now…what if you could plug your goals into a GPS? What would that roadmap look like?

The Components of Your Personal Brand RoadMap

Your destination= Your Career Goals

How can you know where to start if you don’t know where you want to go? Your first step in creating your personal brand roadmap is to decide on your career goals. Here are a few questions to jumpstart your brainstorming session:

Am I looking to climb the traditional career ladder or start my own side-hustle?

What are my favorite brands? Why?

What jobs come to mind when I think “dream job?”

How does the idea of being my own boss make me feel?

What are the 3 most important things for making me happy at work?

What are some companies I’d love to work for?

Your start point= Your Current Career Situation

Now that you know where you want to go, the next step is to do a self-audit of your current career situation.

Many businesses perform self-audits using a S.W.O.T. analysis, which stands for:

Strengths

Weaknesses

Opportunities

Threats

Ask yourself these 4 questions to do a SWOT analysis of where you are in your career:

What are my top 5 skills applicable to the job I want? (Strengths)

What are the skills required for the job I want that I could improve/ need to learn? (Weaknesses)

What are some specific ways I can improve upon my weaknesses? (opportunities)

What are the skills / credentials/ experience I must acquire in order to compete for the job I want? (Threats)

This stage requires brutal honesty and mental toughness.

Roadblocks= the things you must overcome in order to progress towards your goals

The threats & weaknesses you came up with in your SWOT analysis will make up the roadblocks on your career road map. At this stage, ask yourself this question:

How are my weaknesses a threat to my chances of getting the job I want?

These are the things you must address in order to progress. Once you have your roadblocks, you can map out your detours.

Detours= Your strategies for overcoming your roadblocks

For every roadblock you come up with, you need to come up with a detour.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re looking for a job as an event coordinator, and one of the requirements is project management skills.

You don’t currently have project management skills, so this is a roadblock on your career path.

A detour for this roadblock would be taking an online course on project management. Coursera has a project management specialization, which gives you a certificate upon completion.

Online learning platforms like coursera can help you address many of the skills and credential-based roadblocks keeping you from progressing on your career path.

Now you have the components to create your own personal brand roadmap. If you’re a more visual person, then get some colored pencils and physically draw out your personal brand roadmap. If you decide to do that, then I’d love to see what you come up with! Share your roadmaps with me on Twitter 🙂 (@BPucino)