Once you’ve identified your chosen career area, you need to create the professional identity that you want to project to potential employers.
Your professional identity is your value proposition. It’s what makes you unique and sets you apart from others in your chosen career field. This is your personal brand.
Your New Identity
You’ll communicate your professional identity at career fairs and in your LinkedIn profile, resume, and cover letters. It will tell people about your strengths, passions, and unique experience that relates to your chosen career field.
To define your professional identity, you should pull from your top strengths. Use results from your High 5 Test to identify your top strengths. My results are below to show you an example:
Include your top passions in your professional identity. Use results from the O*Net Interest Profiler to identify your top passions. An example of my results are below:
Bring your top strengths, passions, and relevant experience together to define your professional identity. Try to summarize your new professional identity in a few sentences. This will become your mission statement and elevator pitch.
Craft Your Elevator Speech
Your elevator speech shouldn’t last any longer than 30 seconds. It should include:
- Who you are and what relevant experience you have
- What your skills are and what is unique about how you apply them
- What you want to achieve
Here’s an example of an elevator speech that I helped a veteran with:
“I am an Army veteran with over 5 years of experience managing complex technical projects using my leadership and problem-solving abilities. I’m looking for a project management opportunity that utilizes my critical thinking skills along with my passion for leading teams to achieve high-impact business results.”
The more specific you can get on your strengths, passions, and experience the better. You want to show your unique value proposition.
Your professional identity or brand is unique to you. You’ll use it in your professional marketing strategies for your LinkedIn profile, your resume, cover letters, career fairs, and networking activities.
Your professional identity and elevator speech give prospective employers a clear idea of who you are, what you stand for, and what you can offer to their company. Spending some time to create it and then communicate it will go a long way to landing your dream job and career.