Career Distinction: Standing out by Building Your Brand

Career Distinction: Standing Out By Building Your Brand by William Arruda & Kirsten Dixson 2007. Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc. 192 pages, $21.95, Hardback. Intended Audience(s): L Major Headings from the Table of Contents: Understand the Future of Work; Adopt the Career Distinction Mindset; Brand Yourself for Career Success. Step One: Extract - Unearth Your Unique Promise of Value: Know Yourself to Grow Yourself; Remember, It's What They Think That Counts; Define Your Brand Community; Tell Your Brand Story. Step Two: Express - Communicate Your Brand to Your Target Audience: Create Your Career-Marketing Tools; Express Yourself; Assess Your Online Identity; Build Your Brand in Bits and Bytes. Step Three: Exude - Manage Your Brand Environment; Be OnBrand in All That You Do; Get a Visual Identity; Increase Your Career Karma. Evolve and Resolve How Is the Book Most Useful for Its Intended Audience? Career Distinction is an outstanding introduction to and examination of the cutting edge, new new, future of career management with a clear and highly useable methodology. Includes an online workbook and assessment. The Top Five Things You Learned from Reading this Book: Career Distinction brought into focus the new and future paradigm for achieving career success. The authors explain the absolute importance for jobseekers to be crystal clear about who they are and the value they offer (personal brand). The multi-channel approach for communicating the jobseeker's brand to their target audience. 77 per cent of recruiters Google candidates, 35 percent of recruiters eliminate candidates based on what they find in Google, and specific steps to build or fix your online identity. Building an online presence does not replace creating social capital and a socially responsible image. Congratulations to William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson. I got lucky twice by doing a book review on Career Distinction: Stand Out By Building Your Brand. This new book addresses the frequently diluted, rushed-through, and avoided issue that identity is the only and exclusive foundation for career success (everything else is peripheral). I also think this book is the first edition of what may become a leading-edge classic on clarifying, channeling, and communicating career identity. A third benefit of this book is the easy-to-use online assessment and workbook (free with purchase of the book) that is sure to be a popular tool for every college career center and career professional to give their clients. Arruda and Dixson discuss three preeminent questions that indicate the importance of branding for career success: Who am I? What if they do not get me? What if my image does not stick? Without realistic, useable, cohesive answers to all three of these questions, your career will struggle to achieve no better than average success. Step One: Extract - Unearth Your Unique Promise of Value: You cannot communicate what you do not understand. Everybody thinks they understand themselves, and that, if they start talking about themselves, others will understand, as well. It is not so. Few people have the right words to describe themselves, and very few take time to refine, rehearse, and double-check to ensure their promise of value is communicated. Because of lack of clarity, recipients of their communication remain unclear and unconvinced - death to career success. Many career professionals skip over or rush through this identification step. …