"Creating Your Personal Brand"

Last Sunday (June 25, 2017), we had a two-hour workshop on “Creating your personal brand”. This was a interactive session let by Vicky Xu (from Google Cloud Division, regular mentor of our monthly session), and Yvette Castanon (founder of YC Consulting, invited speaker).

#Self-introduction and Goals for the workshop#

At the beginning, each attendee shared the purpose of coming to this session, including “how to do elevator talks”, “how to gain visibility in the company”, “what’s the sparkle from my personal statement”, etc, and Yvette went through the importance of creating a personal and team brand. Then we started with “self-introduction”, Yvette set an example of how to do a confident and comfortable self-introduction. By following that, we also had a one on one practice with her.

#Everyone has a Brand#

Next, we started working on our own personal marketing statement with the guidance from Vicky and Yvette, almost all attendees felt that writing it down is much more difficult than just putting it in the thought. Then mentors gave advice on modifying the initial version, attendees to practice in pairs with the personal statement just created. After several rounds of practice, everyone felt more comfortable of doing this and was motivated to continuously improve personal statement with the times.

#Build your Team Marketing Statement#

Now we need to think as boss, to create a marketing statement for the team. Vicky and Yvette showed some examples and introduced “WIFM” principle, attendees formed small groups to do case study, 10 minutes to draft a team marketing statement and to share it in a hypothetical roundtable in the company.

#Vehicles to share#

There are many vehicles to help us share personal and team marketing statements in daily life, such as newsletters, emails, roundtables, all hands meetings, videos. Mentors encouraged to use all of them to keep refining personal and team brand.

This was a very practical and professional workshop, after the class, all attendees felt inspired and motivated, and looking forward to the following coming up sessions!

Information of our next career club session will be posted through SJTU-SV official account in July.