Title: Promote Yourself: The New Rules for Career Success
Author: Schawbel, Dan
Call Number: 650.14 S313P 2013
Subjects: Career Development; Success in Business; Career
Changes; New Business Enterprises-Management
Number of Pages: 250 pages
ISBN: 9781250044556
Book Description
(from inside of the book jacket):
How
people perceive you at work has always been vital to a successful career. Now
with the Internet, social media, and the unrelenting hum of 24/7 business, the
ability to brand and promote yourself effectively has become absolutely
essential. No matter how talented you are, it doesn’t matter unless managers
can see those talents and think of you as an invaluable employee, a
game-changing manager, or the person whose name is synonymous with success. So,
how do you stand out and get ahead?
The
subtle and amazingly effective art of self-promotion is the razor-thin
difference between success and failure. By drawing on exclusive research on the
modern workplace and countless interviews with the most dynamic professionals,
Dan Schawbel, career guru and founder of Millennial branding, gives you the
new rules for success, and answers your most pressing questions about your
career:
-What are managers really looking for?
-What do you do if you’re stuck at work?
-how do you create a personal brand for professional
success?
-how do you use social media to propel your career?
Promote
Yourself frees you from the outdated rules for getting ahead and lays out a
step-by-step process for building a successful career in an age of
ever-changing technologies and economic uncertainty. By basing your personal
brand on the rock-solid foundation of hard, soft, and online skills that are
essential to get the job done right, and by knowing exactly what managers
value, Schawbel provides you with the unique skills and message that you’ll
need today and for the rest of your career.
Promote
Yourself: The New Rules for Career Success is the definitive book on how to
build an outstanding career.
My Read:
My
first impression after reading this book is its targeted audience is the
Generation Y (those who was born between 1982 to 1993). Still I find this book
helpful: informative and directive. The author’s expertise is personal branding
so it makes great sense when, in this book, he states: your reputation is the
single greatest asset you have and his emphasis on networking inside and
outside the company and the industry.
There
are two terms I have learned from reading this book that are inspirational and
appealing to whoever with ambition and aspiration for taking the high road: subject matter expert and intrapreneurship. The author uses his
own professional experience of building his first personal branding blog to
being recognized by his own manager and those high up and getting his
promotional move to the position that he could exercise his specialty and
enjoyed working on the projects. Becoming the “Go to” person and the subject matter
expert you actually self-promote and become the company’s valuable asset.
Intrapreneurship is about running your own business while on the job. The
following is the good stuff the author lists for intrapreneurship: it’s a great
way to better align who you are with what you do; intrapreneurship allows you
to create new positions and advance in your career faster than you might have
been able to on the regular track; intrapreneurship gives you unique
experiences that differentiate you from your peers; intrapreneurship is less
risky than being an entrepreneur because you’ll have the corporation’s
resources available; intrapreneurship can be a bridge to becoming a full-on
entrepreneur later on (page 204).
There
are skills, according to the author, a person should have to have a successful
career. They are hard skills: be more than your job description, soft skills:
make every impression count, online skills: use social media to your advantage.
If you want to a successful career it makes sense to 1)know what managers look
for, 2)develop cross-generational relationships, 3)build your network at work
and beyond, and 4)turn your passion into a new position(those are titles of
chapters in the book).
Personally
I enjoyed reading the chapter titled “Turn Your Passion into a New Position”
the most. At the beginning it says: Choose a job you love and you will never
have to work a day in your life-Confucius. Upon reading this it reminds me of
what my mother told me when I phoned her about my employment being a page at
the public library. My mother said the job perfectly matched my personality and
I would be able to go to “play” everyday at workplace. She used the word “play” describing what I would be doing
at work. Guess what my mother is right!
Based
upon what I have heard and what I have been through so far I strongly believe
that being successful is no guarantee for or equation to being happy. But being
happy includes being successful. The most helpful saying from this book is, to
me personally, at page 53-54. The author compiles a list of needed soft skills for
the young employees who wish to move up in their careers. To me, the content of
the list is actually teaches a person how to become a better person. The
following is the complete list:
-Strong work ethic
-Optimism/positive attitude
-Good communication skills
-Good conversation skills
-Storytelling abilities for presentations
-Time management abilities
-The ability to listen and to speak to the “human needs”
of coworkers and customers and make them feel understood and respected
-Being good at reading people
-Ability to build relationships and connect with others
on a deep level
-Exercise tact when delivering a message
-The ability to propose solutions to problems, not just
talk about problems
-Meaningfully contribute to brainstorming
-Ability to write well
-Problem-solving skills
-Team player
-being likable
-self-confidence
-Can accept and learn from criticism
-Flexibility/adaptability
-Can work well under pressure
-Empathy
-Integrity
-Sense of humor
Reference:
PersonalBrandingBlog.com
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