Marketing yourself in 2016

One of the biggest challenges young professionals face nowadays is marketing themselves — this can range anything from having an online presence or effectively networking in person. These things can matter a lot in the long term of one’s career, and if the right steps are taken can put you ahead of your peers in the workplace.

Define your product

What service do you offer to your target audience? What can you do to improve or differentiate from your competition? Develop your brand and use a unique voice to tell your story to others. Expand yourself — embrace social media. Be consistent across different platforms (use the same profile picture or even same username). Use your expertise in your field to help others and learn from their mistakes or accomplishments. As a programmer, this can be something as simple as resolving issues on GitHub or opening issues on other repos. Pushing yourself to do more with your own field of work can only help you.

Observe and learn from your customer

This should be your number 1 priority. You need to know who or what your selling to in order to design the best plan of approach in marketing. Understanding what your customer needs is one thing, but understanding what they don’t know they need will give you an extra edge. This is where some perspective is very helpful and will help you target and create content that will resonate with your customer.

Promote yourself

Be active on social media. Is the Super Bowl going on? Tweet about it, make a joke (but keep it PG), or start a conversation about how that call by the referee was flat out wrong. LinkedIn provides a great way to make blog posts and create content impressions on your profile. In a modern content driven ecosystem, this is perfect and will help you publicize yourself more. As your job market gets more and more competitive, thinking outside the box is required and will be how you get your dream job. No longer are resumes end-all be-all for a job applicant. Take advantage of the resources available to you. Create your own website and make your own content or showoff what you can do.

Conclusion

As long as you stick to D.O.P. and you are actually good at what you do, you might actually have a chance out there. The job market for any position is a challenge for a young professional, but the more you learn from your peer s— their accomplishments and mistakes — the better you will market yourself.