Build Your Personal Brand and Become a Trusted Advisor

As we conclude part three of this book, you will use all of the skills you have acquired so far to build your personal brand. You are helping and transforming people’s lives, and this builds trust in you. Your personal brand will allow you to expand this trust to more people, help you attract people to your projects and initiatives, and position you as a high-achieving, respected professional. This chapter will help you use all you have done up to now to position your brand in the market. When talking about personal branding, the first thing that comes to mind is the following: Do I need this? Do I have to build my own personal brand? I don’t like to self-promote, so why should I even have a brand?

The reality is everyone has a brand. You already have your brand. The question is, do you have control over what people believe about you? (See the interview with Yolande later in this chapter.) Further, your core values...

What is personal branding?

We covered storytelling earlier in the book, and to be effective in communicating your personal brand, you are going to need to leverage those skills to share both your personal brand and those stories we talked about developing. Throughout your career, if you have developed an authentic personal brand and you stay true to it, and you consistently and effectively communicate your brand messages, you will build trust and establish a lasting personal and professional brand that can provide opportunities for career growth, advancement, and recognition. Let’s start by understanding some of the elements of personal branding.

Building trust

We live in a society that’s based on trust. We trust that our company is going to pay our salaries. Our company trusts that we’re going to work and build the software. Our customers trust that we’re going to deliver high-quality software that will solve their problems. Our customers and all...

Identify your professional brand

To begin, you need to define your vision and purpose. Personally and professionally, what values are important to you and how do you want your audience to perceive you? How will you make an impact on them? What skill sets or experience do you have that distinguish you from others who have these same values?

Assess your personal brand inventory. After you establish your purpose, values, and skills, take an inventory of how you are perceived in the industry. Take note of your traits, habits, and characteristics. Make any adjustments necessary to reflect your current reality.

Construct a narrative around this inventory. You should branch out to create narratives for basic questions such as, “Tell me about yourself,” “Tell me about your resume of experience,” “Tell me where you are from and where you are going,” and “What makes you special?” Use examples from your experience to share stories...

How to build your professional brand

Let us now discuss how to build your professional brand. The following subsections cover four steps that are extremely important in building your professional brand.

The first step is to understand yourself because your brand is already in you. A professional brand is not something that appears out of the blue. It’s not something that you decide you want to be or become. It is a construction using everything that you already did and all the reputation you have, all your experience and history combined with the things that you want to do in the future. You always start from where you are right now – from your skills, your projects, your experience, your visibility, and the people that you’re ready to help.

You start from where you are right now – and then you look to the future. How do you want to present all of this to your audience and your future connections? The first step is to understand who you are, understand...

How can we attract an audience?

Now that you see the importance of being a trusted advisor to your audience, the next important step is to attract an audience.

Building a brand is all about successfully attracting your own audience. We are all publishers. Our experience is that attracting an audience is something that technical people are afraid of because developers (and technical people in general) are not looking to be celebrities. They’re not trying to promote themselves. When you start talking about attracting people, it always sounds unnecessary and doesn’t seem to be connected to your career. Some people think that this is only for people who want to build a product or something like that.

Take responsibility for helping others – leaders take responsibility

In reality, attracting an audience is you taking responsibility for helping other people. Think about it. You have the knowledge, you have the capacity to mentor people, you have the experience...

Help them help others

One last thing that creates impact is to help your audience help others. We talk a lot in this book about both building and participating in communities. The more you can bring the people that trust you into communities that you’re part of, then the more support they’re going to have, the more they will be able to help others, and the larger transformation you can help them achieve. Let’s look at the various ways in which you can build a community from your audience.

Share their stories (testimonials)

One way is to incentivize your audience to share their stories. It’s an easy way to help others by letting them share their struggles, the actions they took, and the results they achieved. All of this helps other people from the community to really want to take those steps and want to be involved.

Promote an environment of support

You can also promote an environment of support. Incentivize and inspire people in your community...

Leveraging your personal brand professionally

All of this may sound like a full-time job of helping others and that it will not bring any benefit to you and your career. So let’s take a look at how doing everything we’ve discussed can actually help you professionally.

Trust leads to opportunity

First of all, trust is the best way to create opportunities and get amazing positions. The best-paying, most interesting, and challenging positions in the market are offered to people that we trust. When someone has an interesting position inside their company or is working on an interesting project and needs help from someone, they will invite someone they trust to be part of it. The same thing happens inside companies. When teams, managers, and developers need help to hire someone, they will look for people that they trust. When you build trust with other developers, managers, and people from different companies, you increase the chance that someone that trusts you will...

Interview

Yolande Poirier

My name is Yolanda Poirier, and I currently am working at Neo4J. I’m in charge of the community there, globally, but particularly in the US. I’m responsible for meetups, websites, forums – you could call it community, but that’s a fancy word – everything that touches developer communities and data science. Also, the champion program. We have a Discord account, for example. We are running an online conference in the fall, which I’m also involved with, both promotion and the Call for Papers. I’m part of DevRel, which is really nice as well because my counterparts are technical and they help us with all the initiatives. So that’s very nice. And I’ve been doing all of this for quite a while, as you know.

Q: So, this is my question. You’ve been working with communities for quite a while. How did you get started? How did you get involved with communities and working with branding, marketing...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned key marketing concepts about branding, how to define your own style and attract your audience, how to apply simple marketing concepts to your own brand, how to attract the right people that you can help, and how to use your brand to get amazing internal and external opportunities.

So here you have it: a full Masterplan for the Developer Career. It may look overwhelming right now, but every step listed in the book can be done in small first, and then grow when you have results. Also, there is no need to do it all at once. Your developer career is an infinite game: keep working on it, and it will always improve and grow.

There is just one thing that can prevent this book from helping you - not taking action.

You can do small things. You can do just a few things. You can even decide not to do some, or even many of them. Yet, if you don’t take action on any of the things we showed you here, nothing will happen to your career.

We hope...