Personal Branding For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16

Personal Branding in the Workplace

In This Chapter

Shifting away from an employee mind-set

Showing your boss and coworkers what you’re made of

Getting in sync with your company’s brand

Using your brand to improve your current job — or succeed at a new one

One of the key factors boosting the popularity of personal branding is the changing landscape of the workforce. In the 1980s, early 1990s, and late 2000s, U.S. companies laid off a lot of people. Certainly, such layoffs weren’t completely unprecedented, but what happened in that period was something new. Previously, a company that laid off workers during a slow business cycle was likely to increase its workforce when business picked up again. As a result, a laid-off worker’s hard times were almost certain to improve when the health of the industry he worked in improved. But in the 1980s, companies started closing departments, sending work overseas … in general, taking steps to ensure that they would never again require the number of people they had previously employed.

These days (unlike in the early 1980s and prior), ...