Personal branding Archives

The past several months haven’t been easy for anyone especially considering the health crisis that resulted in an economic recession and massive unemployment. In October 2020, an estimated 3.8 million Filipinos were found jobless, 600,000 Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW’s) displaced, and more than 25-million people within the informal economy are struggling to make ends meet.

While Metamorphosis Group (MG) has always been a career coaching firm supporting job seekers, career explorers, career changers, and aspiring entrepreneurs into new opportunities, their services weren’t always accessible to some people. Over time, President and CEO Danica Octa, realized that there was a way to provide these services to more people at a volume scale. That was when she decided to host a virtual career fair. But it wasn’t just any virtual career fair, it had to be educational, value-adding, and, most of all, culture-changing.

“Unique and exciting opportunities definitely await in a struggling economy. Professionals must now realize that it’s time we evolve together to make things work out in this inevitable paradigm shift. In order to provide a purposeful career path for job hunters and valuable contributions to the employer’s company vision, a venue where we exchange thoughts is necessary to achieve change,” Octa explains.

“This event we’re hosting is more than just helping people find jobs and be equipped to pass job applications. We crafted this to influence significant change in an entire culture and lifestyle so that we can truly adjust to the New Normal,” added Octa.

MG decided to do the Virtual Career Academy Summit on Digital Transformation mainly because of three things: 1) More people need to have access to premium career and entrepreneurship coaching, 2) The unemployment gap and the challenges in talent acquisition need to be solved for the sake of both candidates and employers, and 3) Digital Transformation needs to be promoted as the ‘new normal’ of careers and most especially the future of work regardless of the chosen career path or profession.

#1 Providing access to premium career and entrepreneurship coaching

The company’s certified career coaches and even the corporate partners’ own HR professionals have committed to helping participants in the event in their resume and interview skills for job seekers and, alternatively, pitching skills for aspiring entrepreneurs. Participants are encouraged to take advantage of these free services in order to help them discover their career purpose and most especially the value they can deliver to stakeholders.

Oftentimes, a lot of good talent is not realized simply because they don’t know how to properly and effectively present their strengths and experience to hiring managers and potential clients. This is unfortunate and what seems to be a major reason for the unemployment in the Philippines as well as in the challenges that talent acquisition specialists experience.

Not everyone is a salesperson or a marketer, but to know at least the fundamentals of it that can result in a job opportunity would be advantageous. These coaching sessions are meant to solve these problems.

#2 Bridging the unemployment gap and address the challenges in talent acquisition

Ironically, when job seekers say there aren’t many jobs in the market anymore, recruiters say exactly the same thing about job seekers. Given that coaching is meant to help candidates communicate their value much better to win more opportunities, it is a win-win situation because employers will be able to acquire excellent talent. But there also needs to be active participation by employers in the movement.

These employers will need to work on their employer branding to further attract the best talents for their company. A lot of successful pursuits that lead to better results in talent attraction involve career events that provide significant value to candidates. Doing so does not only equip candidates in the job hunt but lets employers build meaningful and long-term relationships with these candidates.

This is an asset in itself even before candidates decide whether or not to apply for these companies. If not for getting immediate hires, it helps grow the overall sustainable brand of the company which may result in other stakeholder value. This event is meant to provide the avenue for employers to do so through industry career talks and meet-and-greet booths with job seekers on all five days of the event.

#3 Promoting Digital Transformation as the New Normal of careers and the Future of Work

A lot of people have said that the pandemic has expedited the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) which is simply the period where the digital, physical, and biological worlds merge. It is very much evident in how most of our lives are going digital and has become the means to thrive in the world.

That being said, Digital Transformation is no longer limited to just skill and profession. It has also become a lifestyle and mindset that people need to know how to accept if they want to experience the best career and life they can have. People need to see how it is applicable regardless of career choices may it be consulting work, journalism, engineering, and even as simple as administrative work. Everything is going digital. Both soft and hard digital skills need to be developed, or at least accepted, especially in these trying times.

Co-presented by Microsoft and Go Philippines, Metamorphosis Group’s Virtual Career Academy Summit 2021 on Digital Transformation aims to bring in numerous industry experts, from career coaches to HR professionals and practitioners, to help graduating students, young professionals, and tenured experts bridge their skills gap with their strength as a generation: Technology. It will provide a defined Career Roadmap through webinars, virtual employer booths, mock interviews, resume workshops, and even an online raffle with prizes that help participants in their career!

Featuring industry experts such as Jam Zulueta, Ziggy Zulueta, Raf Lopez, Yvana Wong, Lara Eviota, Jon Gancayco, Melboy Pangan, Reinnite Madrid, among many others. Participated by the top startups and corporations such as NextPay, BusinessWorld Publishing Corp, the Institute for Integrality, and REMAX Portfolio.

During the event, participants will get a chance to win exciting and amazing raffle prizes including cash vouchers for iPhone 12, an IPad Pro 2020, a MacBook Pro 2020 as well as a 10% Barkada Scholarship to the Singapore-based Reactor School programs and a 100% Scholarship for Metamorphosis Group’s Premium Career Coaching Program.

The career fair is absolutely free. It’s the perfect opportunity to learn something new with extremely valuable resources.

Event Date: March 22-26, 2021

Event Time: 9AM-6PM each day

You may register here for free: https://metamorphosis-group.org/vca-summit. This event is open to the public.

For additional information, please contact Metamorphosis Group at [email protected]

MARKETECH APAC is a media partner at Virtual Career Academy Summit 2021.

If you want to land that job, you better start thinking like an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur sees the job posting as a company’s way of generating leads for new employees, perceives the resume as a sales brochure they give to an interested customer or client, views the interview as an exploratory discussion about how the candidate and employer can work together, identifies the salary negotiation as a measure of each other’s value propositions, and recognizes employment as a partnership to help the organization thrive in a competitive market.

In the same way that companies behave that way about their business dealings, so should job seekers towards employment opportunities. So how do top entrepreneurs acquire the best opportunities in the market? Simple–personal branding.

What is personal branding?

Personal branding is many things. It is a story, a vision and mission statement, an image, a perceived value, and much more. Whether or not you are consciously developing your personal brand, chances are there is already a clear picture of who you are to other people. If you want to do an audit on your ‘Personal Branding score’ you might want to consider checking what your network and even what your digital footprint is saying about you. There are many ways to check but a simple Google search will suffice most of the time.

Personal branding is a soft and inbound form of selling and marketing. In this case, you will need that just to get your foot in the door in job applications. But it is not as grand as you think. In reality, employers do not really care about your badges and certifications, what they care about and what they usually ask themselves to evaluate you is “Will this person really deliver value to my company?” “Can he increase revenue or reduce cost, or perhaps increase our stakeholder value?” You have to prove it with what you know and it has to show in that interview and even in as simple as your LinkedIn profile, posts, likes, shares, and comments.

How does one start building their personal brand?

You may be wondering about the ways people are able to build their personal brand. Certain ways include working on your wardrobe, makeup, body language, and also your aura. But with the rise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, wherein the separation between the digital, physical, and biological world blurs, more and more people are resorting to also building their personal brand online. Such ways to do so are through social media platforms like LinkedIn as well as the traditional websites.

There is a whole lot of process in building one’s personal brand online, but you cannot really make a solid one if you do not work on drafting your purpose, or in sales or marketing terms, your ‘value proposition’.

Maybe you are wondering where to get the inspiration to position yourself as someone of value. Because you will actually have to produce a lot of content whether online or offline to demonstrate this. Here is a tip – evaluate your identity and everything else attached to it so you can convince employers that you are clear with your intentions and so they can ultimately hire you.

What was your life story like and how did it influence the way you interact with the world? What life-changing experiences did you have and how did they inspire you to make specific decisions today? Do you see the world in numbers or is it very abstract to you? What advocacies do you have? What would you say are your talents and skills?

The answers to these questions will help you craft a sales pitch about you and your talent as well as how this can provide value to people. That way, it will be a lot easier to market and sell your brand so you can get the job you need.

What comes next after finding my ‘purpose’?

Once you have jotted down your ‘purpose’ clearly, you can now identify the features of your talent to support your personal brand.

Here is one example – someone had just discovered that his purpose is helping organizations in reducing poverty. If you think about it, there are many ways to support his brand with this image. Perhaps he would like to position himself as an educator who wants to make his students more employable so that they can have a decent source of living. Maybe he would want to become an entrepreneur who is growing his business to create additional jobs in the market. He might also want to brand himself as a politician wanting to create policies to improve the conditions of the job market. The choice is entirely up to him and is dependent on the option he has the competency to do. Regardless, whichever he chooses determines the next step.

The next step looks like this: If he chose, for example, to position himself as an educator, he might want to consider flashing credentials focusing on his academic background and teaching experience. That means awards, research papers, teacher volunteer work, and high grades are important.

If he goes for the entrepreneur route, it may be a bit more different. Who he knows and the amount of skin in the game he has is more important to effectively position himself as such. Now if he opts for being a politician, he might want to also consider establishing the existence of his vast connections and how genuine he is in providing quality public service. Only after making his choice was he able to make a clear messaging online about who he is and how valuable his service and talents are to people.

Why personal branding?

At the end of the day, it is not really much about bragging who you are and what people think about you. personal branding is ultimately a means to communicate your value and how this value can help solve problems and change lives. In truth, jobs did not exist just for the sake of producing jobs in the market. They were created to solve problems, and if you are able to prove that you are capable of effectively solving the pain points of organizations in need of your talent, then you can truly get the opportunities that match your needs.

The author is Danica Octa, president, and CEO of Metamorphosis Group.

Metamorphosis Group is a career coaching firm supporting job seekers, career explorers, and career changers into new opportunities.

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