Personal Branding Trends for 2016 - Part 2: Get Ready To Gain A Competitive Edge

In my previous personal branding trends post, I shared four important developments for you to be aware of so you can build your brand better in 2016. In this follow-on post, I share three more.



The Transformation of Training
The world is moving too fast for us to get by on what we already know. People and companies with strong personal brands make learning a priority – knowing that if they aren’t learning daily, they’re falling behind. Your ability to learn and grow as you build your brand will be critical to success.
Learning inside organizations will become an even more important key to company success and employee engagement. Innovative organizations will use learning as a way to attract top talent. Some organizations are already adopting right time, right content approaches to hard and soft skill training. Kelly Palmer, LinkedIn CLO said “With our LearnIn platform at LinkedIn, we put the learner in the driver’s seat. The old LMS-centric model is not relevant in today’s rapidly evolving workplace.  Learning should not be about process or compliance or tracking, it needs to focus on empowering your people with access to the skills they need when they need them. We are building a culture of life-long learning so our people are prepared for success and engaged in their work.”
Workshops and live training will be combined with (and in some cases, replaced by) more on-demand learning opportunities. Video will become more pervasive as a learning tool. Employees will become responsible for identifying the training they need and through crowdsourcing will have an impact on which training modules are the most valuable. Kelly Palmer went on to say “Social actions are built into our learning platform. This helps my team know what’s valued by our people and it makes our most compelling learning assets visible to others throughout the company. Real-time learning gets integrated into daily actions and becomes a natural part of the workday, not an add-on activity.”
 You, Inc., In The Virtual World
Competition is forcing us to become even more creative to differentiate ourselves from the pack – whether we’re searching for a job, going up for promotion, seeking new clients or sourcing staff for our team. The best way to gain a competitive edge is to have your own website. There was a time when I thought a LinkedIn profile was enough, but today, with more people more skilled at personal branding, the bar has been raised. Having your own professional website will give you precision in how you position yourself among the competition and help you stand out from the myriad others who do what you do. When it comes to personal branding, differentiation is key.

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Just as every company has a website, you too will need a personal site if you want to take total control of your career. That may sound daunting, but the good news is that the barriers to launching a highly polished, customized site have totally disappeared. They are no longer expensive or require a significant investment in time to create or maintain. Newly emerging platforms like branded.me (disclosure: branded.me is a business partner of my company, Reach Personal Branding) and others will become indispensable as you seek to build an authentic, differentiated and compelling home on the web. And although these platforms are becoming more popular, there is currently an opportunity to stand out from your peers.
LinkedIn Delivers A Competitive Advantage For Companies
The thought used to be “If my employee is on LinkedIn, she must be looking for a job.” True, LinkedIn launched as an online resume and virtual networking tool. Since then, LinkedIn has transformed to a comprehensive personal and corporate branding platform. The fear that used to be associated with employees using LinkedIn is being replaced at innovative organizations with “If I get all my employees to use LinkedIn regularly, we will have a leg up on our competition.”
Kirsten Boileau, Digital Startup Director at SAP said “We value our people as integral to our social media strategy. As part of our social selling initiative, we are getting everyone – from our C-Suite executives to our most recent new hires educated on how to use social media for individual and organizational success. We have implemented a weekly podcast called Social Selling with Game Changers, social selling and employee advocacy training, and are generating awareness to make this pervasive throughout the organization.
Jack Teuber, PwC Creative Leader sums it up this way “There are simply too many benefits to ignore. People trust people more than brands, making engaged employees on LinkedIn a potentially powerful channel to the market. It can increase visibility and targeting of corporate messages, humanize a company’s brand and make it easier to find qualified talent via employee networks. Look for more innovative companies to build comprehensive social branding and LinkedIn programs that cover all the stages of the employee lifecycle, from onboarding through alumni.”
Learn how to engage your entire team in LinkedIn in this on-demand webinar which you can access here.
To expand your success and the strength of your brand in 2016, identify the trends that will have the greatest impact on your career success and make a plan to capitalize on them.