Marketing Yourself The Right Way

Published on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 by Kelly Category: Career Development

Career Development & Marketing Yourself

Career Development and Marketing Yourself

SAN FRANCISCO (CollegeToCareers)- Every college student should prepare themselves in college for employment. One area of preparation that many students neglect is career development. Essentially, developing your out of classroom skills to be competitive in the workforce is what we are addressing. One of these skills that is highly important for you to develop is marketing yourself. To market yourself means to run a “sales pitch” of yourself to an employer, just like a product or business schematic. This strategy is great regardless of your industry, niche, or career you are choosing. Being able to speak about yourself without seeming overly confident is skill that takes practice. Actually, many students are on the other end, not confident enough. Marketing yourself is basically an effort to stand out amongst the competition.

View Yourself As A Product

Similar to selling a high quality product, marketing yourself requires that you become similar to a product, with your own unique abilities and traits. Pretty much, marketing yourself is all about explaining what you can do for someone without the added fluff and nonsense of the overhead work environment.

Putting your life into the perspective of being a “product” will make you look at things a bit differently. Just like a piece of property, you fit with certain job criteria better than others. Because business is a dog eat dog world, it will be much easier to fine tune a business strategy if the primordial gloves are off.

Every product on the market is being sold because it serves a purpose. When marketing yourself, you don’t look at yourself like a person anymore. You are material wealth and the capability to produce additional revenue for the business model of your choice.

It’s kind of like a game of words, but the situational context usually does a much better job of describing the job applicant and what he or she has to offer. So, now that you’re prepared to look at yourself like an object or material goods, try to make yourself fit into job fields. Look at the job field like an object as well. Each part of the job represents a triangle piece of a complete circle. Unless you fit the basic requirements of the circle itself, you aren’t going to fit into the job description.

This also opens the pathways to discovery and foregoes any possibility of background riff-raff such as mingling with co-workers. If you market yourself, it all becomes “strictly business”. If you keep these key elements of marketing yourself in mind, you stand to gain a lot of insight about what your individual assets as a worker really are.

Career Development: “Market yourself in a way that will leave a lasting impression.”

Share the knowledge: