Who Are You? How Do You Communicate Your Professional Brand?
Working in an “opaque” profession, information professionals (unlike, say, veterinarians) constantly must explain what we do and why it’s worthwhile for employers to pay us for doing it. Based on the opening chapters in the book she co-authored with Jill Hurst-Wahl, Ulla de Stricker covers such brand-related topics as:
- Determining a good professional “fit” (in what types of work environments are we able to leverage most fully our innate talents?)
- Getting used to promotional activities
- Fashioning the value message
- Choosing and crafting a professional image.
>> Communicating Your Brand slidedeck (PPS file added 11/17/2011)
>> View recorded program (link added 4/29/2012)
About the Presenter
Ulla de Stricker co-authored the book, The Information and Knowledge Professional’s Career Handbook: Define and Create Your Success, with her colleague Jill Hurst-Wahl. (Jill will be RMSLA’s Virtual Lunch speaker on Thursday, December 15.) As a consultant in information and knowledge management (see www.destricker.com), Ulla assists her clients in a wide range of challenges such as corporate memory and intercollegial collaboration. She is a frequent contributor to the profession through articles and presentations at conferences, and she frequently offers support and guidance to her colleagues in career planning related matters. Ulla also is currently Chapter Cabinet Chair-Elect of the Special Libraries Association.
Question raised at the Virtual Lunch with Ulla de Stricker: “Can one reinvent oneself midway through a career?”
It was submitted at the very end of the webinar and too late for an on-air response, but Ulla has replied:
Yes! Probably not overnight, but certainly over a period of time. In SLA we have excellent examples of corporate librarians who became social media experts so that their current professional persona is not associated with the one they had several years ago. In fact, it is likely for us all to have a certain evolution of our professional brand through the years, in step with developments in technology and other factors.
It is not uncommon for professionals to realize, for example, “working in a law firm is no longer what I am excited by” or “the academic environment suited me when I was young, but now my interests and preferences have changed”. Of course, it is a luxury to be able to explore new professional domains while still employed – but I would go so far as to say “let us not allow let fear of the new to keep us locked in an old environment in which we are no longer fulfilled”. As always, we are in control of the efforts we put into professional development.
For anyone interested in “moving on” to a new area of professional activity, there would be a number of avenues. One could be as simple as “immerse, learn, and begin to blog”; another could be as serious as “go get another university degree in the new subject”. What is constant, however, is the fact that we “stick the neck out” and “show what we are made of” to a series of audiences … our immediate colleagues in the beginning, our association peers next, and then the entire world though e.g. our blogs and published works.
A related question could be “can one lean on past professional reputation when building a new one?” Again, I’d say yes. “Marnie Chase, well known for her work in ABC, is now active in DEF and will deliver a presentation on the topic of GHI at …”. There will come a day, though, when the past professional persona is mentioned only in an official bio because fewer and fewer of our colleagues even remember it.
Reinventing a new professional persona mid-career may take a great deal of effort … but it is likely to be very much worth it. Go for it!