Building a Personal Brand

In this post, I’ve tried to outline the purpose of building an online presence and personal brand. My goals are to grow my brand as a DevOps engineer, but that doesn’t preclude this being used for any other type of career, digital or otherwise.

Documenting your learning journey through content creation

A learning journey, no matter what the material, would benefit from being documented publicly (if appropriate). It serves as a record for you and the world.

Content doesn’t need to be complicated or original

As you are going to be posting your content publicly, it will improve the quality of your note taking, and thus your learning and understanding of a topic. The purpose of the content is information transfer not entertainment, there is no need for literary genius or originality.

There is no need to be a perfectionist

Share everything you learn on various platforms, long format and short. If posting to a blog, then reuse your content on LinkedIn and X.

Make sure to reuse your own content on each platform

Content generation, rooted in writing, will create opportunity

Writing is an enabling and empowering activity. It will allow you to generate a lot of content to share on a variety of platforms. This will open new opportunities, many of which you can not foresee.

Everything starts with writing, so take personal notes for everything you learn or consume. (Eg in Obsidian)

Building a Personal Brand

Being active in the digital world is critical, especially if you are trying to grow your career in an industry that requires proof of experience and skills, the analog world is becoming less relevant.

In order to build a strong online presence, you need to have a personal brand that shows your value to others. Your personal brand is how you want others to perceive you, and this is facilitated through writing and associated content creation.

A strong personal brand will open opportunities as it will have reach and a large audience. If executed consistently you will be able to leverage this to your benefit.

Jobs will come to you and unexpected things will happen.