When it comes to establishing a professional brand, it's important to put your best face forward, no matter how tempting it can be to resort to modesty. While bragging isn't always the best way to attract employers, self-deprecation rarely helps either. Just four little words can ruin any efforts you've put into creating your professional brand, and you may not even realize you're using them.
Comparing the Right Way
When you compare yourself to others in your field, employers are on the lookout for the positives, not the negatives. While it may seem obvious that you wouldn't highlight the things you don't do well when trying to establish your professional brand, you may be highlighting the things you don't do as well as others.
Using the phrase "just as good as" opens up the door to a whole host of problems for you, including damage to the professional brand you're trying to build in order to attract employers. Why would you want them to compare you to others in your field who may have different qualifications when you could be offering them just a little more information to use during their comparisons?
Give Them More To Consider
You may be tempted to say "I'm just as good as the next guy," but what you really want employers to know is you are better in different ways. Even without the fancy degrees and learned skills your competition has, you have more to offer than you realize.
Spin your experience in a positive light in order to strengthen your professional brand. Maybe you don't have the advanced degree in your field, but you've been cross-trained to handle a wider variety of problems than your fellow applicants have been taught to tackle. Your years of experience in the field could be the spin you need to make you stand out above a sea of degrees and younger candidates.
Put Your Strengths First
Putting your strengths first is especially important when building your resume as this is often the first and most important glimpse of your professional brand. Play to your strengths by listing key successes and skills first, so your potential employers can see at a glance what sets you apart from the rest. Often, employers have very little information to go on when narrowing down candidates for interviews, so a strong resume that exudes a powerful professional brand can be the key difference that sets you apart from a stack of other applicants, and it could just get you the job.
Never leave employers comparing you in a way that makes you look "just as good" as the other guys. If you can build a strong professional brand by putting your best self forward online and in the real world, you'll never really have to compete with anyone but yourself for the job.
Image courtesy of Naypong from freedigitalphotos.net
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