I have been a technical communicator all my professional life, but I have not always been called one. As a real job hopper, I moved from one position to another, from technical author to documentation specialist, documentation manager, implementation manager, business consultant, information advisor, and even product marketer. Every two to three years I switched roles while, in essence, I used the same skill set.
About ten years ago, something happened that drastically changed my perspective and compelled me to act. After being a happy job hopper for almost 20 years, I lost my job due to the bankruptcy of my employer. And it was then that I found out that having a diverse professional background can be both a blessing and a curse. To some people, a long list with a variety of roles looks impressive, but others perceive this as a failure to persist in any of the listed roles. One of the interviewers at that time summarized it in one simple question: Who is the person behind this long list of work experiences? That was when I realized that I needed to make the pattern in my work explicit and that I needed to specify the distinct driver for all my actions, building a storyline that explains who I am, what I stand for, and what I bring to the table. In this article, I will share my recipe for successful personal branding.
The importance of personal branding
Why would we, as technical communicators, spend time on our personal branding when we are not looking for another role or assignment? The answer is that personal branding is not something we can switch on or off. We do it every day and with everyone we encounter. It happens at the coffee corner while speaking with colleagues, or in a workshop with a client. It is important to be aware of this and stay in control. From the moment I started working more consciously on my personal branding, I have seen many positive effects in my relationships with leadership, colleagues, and clients. My branding helped me to quickly build an internal and external network and have meaningful conversations with the people in that network.
In fact, I credit my current role, my network, and my assignments to a large extent to my personal branding. I work for a global organization with over 700,000 people. In such an organization, it can be easy to be overlooked. My branding has given me the right visibility to the right people and ensured that people know how to find me whenever there is a question or opportunity related to technical documentation. Personal branding is important and will influence your career, your network, and your daily work. And most importantly: You are in control.
The building blocks of your brand
As in every good recipe, I will start with the ingredients. These will be the building blocks of your brand. To successfully build your personal brand, I found that it is important to answer the following questions:
- How do you want to be perceived?
- What is it that drives and motivates you?
- What are your strengths, unique skills, and experiences?
- What is it that you do?
Unlike food recipes, the idea is not to mix these four ingredients but to use them in a structured way, starting with the goal.
A goal-driven approach
Your personal branding – how people perceive you – is not a stamp that you get just based on your actions but something that you carefully build and maintain. In the early years of my career, referring to my master’s degree in Linguistic Competence and the work I have been doing in technical documentation were enough for people to form an opinion. Over time it became more complex, and I lost control over how people viewed me. So how can we take control over our brand again?
It all starts with setting a goal for how we want people to perceive us. Here are a few examples of goals technical communicators have given me:
“I want to be seen as the advisor in technical communications in my company.”
“I want to be seen as the ultimate expert in product communication.”
“I want to be seen as the UX writing specialist.”
Consider this goal an ever-evolving parameter that you write down for yourself. You can compare it to driving a car or riding a bike: You aim for a certain place on the horizon, steer towards it, and then select a new destination when you reach it. This is exactly what branding is. At the beginning of 2023, I set my goal of being recognized as the inspiring leader for technical communication within the company Accenture. Now, as of June 1, 2024, I was formally appointed as the Technical Publication Services Lead for Europe and have placed a new dot on my horizon again.
Over the past ten years, I recognized a pattern, a clear relation between the goals I set for myself and the professional development I achieved. But it is not just me: I have been teaching my findings and approach to Accenture Leadership and consultants since 2015, and I have noticed a similar pattern with those who actively pursue their goals.
My personal goal is now to gain global recognition for my thought leadership as an innovator of technical publication services. It is this dot on the horizon that keeps me on my toes and helps me assess where to focus my efforts.
Your purpose and beliefs
I can advise and guide organizations to improve their authoring and publication processes. I can also develop new documentation models for my clients or design innovations to improve the way they work. This is what I do every day. But what does this say about me? How does it help people to distinguish me from everyone else?
About ten years ago, I was introduced to a marketing concept called “The Golden Circle”, in a TED talk by author and motivational speaker Simon Sinek. In his TED talk and his book Start with Why (Penguin UK, 2011), Sinek describes what he calls a naturally occurring pattern, “a way of thinking, acting and communicating that give some leaders the ability to inspire those around them”. In essence, what Sinek says is that most companies and most people can explain what they do, but very few companies and people can explain why they do it. While explaining what you do is not inspiring, explaining why you do what you’re doing makes all the difference in the world.
If you think about it, it makes sense. Most of us are perfectly capable of describing what we do and, by now, I can fill at least twelve pages with it in my resume. But it is uninspiring and doesn’t say a thing about me. What is inspiring is what drives us: the things that we love and cherish, the things that engage us and give us the energy to do our work every day using everything we have.
Answering the question of what drives you is not easy, and it took me quite some time to answer it for myself. In my workshops, I often see participants writing long introductions about the importance of a certain change, approach, or technology – and though this might drive the changes in a sector or industry, it doesn’t have much to do with you unless you put yourself at the heart of this change and explain what drives you to commit to it.
For example, as a technical communicator, you could start your WHY by explaining the importance of technical documentation:
“Everything I do comes from the belief that technical documentation is key for product usage, maintenance, troubleshooting, and repair. Technical information should be understandable, accurate, and easy to find.”
This seems to be a fair statement and shows commitment to our profession, but what does it say about the person who wrote it? During my personal branding workshop at tcworld conference 2023, one participant came up with this beautiful statement that seems to come straight from the heart:
“Everything I do comes from my passion for sharing my knowledge with other people and creating trust by transparency and honesty.”
In this second example, the WHY statement is no longer directly related to the work this participant is doing as a technical communicator but really describes what drives the person behind the technical communicator. It is a perfect example of how setting your purpose and beliefs at the heart of your branding enables people to see the core of who you are and what you stand for. This goes beyond the role that you play in an organization. Being clear about your objectives can also help to avoid conflicts at work and open new career paths for positions that you have not been considered for before.
Your unique selling point
While your purpose and beliefs will describe WHY you do the things you do, your strengths and experiences are your unique selling points. They define HOW you do things.
There are various tools and methods to help you identify your strengths. I have used a strength finder tool, which gave me a good overview of my strengths and their impact on my daily work. Another approach is to ask your supervisors, colleagues, or clients for input. A typical strength I would expect in many technical communicators is communication: the ability to describe and explain in writing and speaking. If you have this strength, you can make people read your content and listen to you. Some of us might also be drivers, eager to start an action. Others might be more analytical, looking for proof before they start a certain action. Just like with our DNA, our combination of strengths defines who we are.
Your profession
Most people find it difficult to describe what motivates and drives them, or WHY they do the things they do. I see a few people in my workshops struggle with HOW they utilize their strengths and experiences to explain how they do what they do. Only a small group of people finds it hard to explain WHAT they do.
There is a logical explanation for this. Imagine your job is to write service instructions for technical products. This is an activity visible to your co-workers, management, and clients. And if someone were to ask you: “What is it that you do?” you would have no problem answering that you are writing service instructions for technical products. For people in an advisory role, it gets a bit more complex. When, for instance, people ask me what I do, I need to explain a little bit about the technical publication domain and how I shape services and solutions for it. My recommendation here is to always have an example ready, a small story to illustrate what you have recently achieved.
Your professional profile text
Now that we have looked at the building blocks, it is time to start writing our new profile. Fortunately, there is a recipe for improving your personal branding that is so easy that everyone can do it. The recipe contains only three ingredients: WHY – HOW – WHAT. And while we start filling in these three ingredients, we keep an eye on our goal to make sure we position ourselves in such a way that it contributes to how we want to be seen.
Let’s use my profile as an example. In a traditional format, my profile would look like this:
“Kees van Mansom is the Accenture lead for Technical Publication Services in Europe, working on reshaping technical publication processes for clients in Automotive, Aerospace & Defense, and Manufacturing.”
Though this explains in one sentence what I do, it is uninspiring and doesn’t create the right image of me. Now, let’s look at my actual profile, starting with the WHY section:
“I must have been born as a (technical) writer and storyteller, since I have been telling stories and writing technical content as long as I can remember. My main motivation – you could call it my purpose – has always been helping people. I feel at my best when working on transformations and innovations that have a positive impact on people, and I thoroughly enjoy presenting, writing, and leading design thinking sessions about my ideas.
I have a passion for Technical Communication, leveraging my vast experience in this field by designing services and solutions that profoundly change the way people create, publish, and use technical publications.”
The next step is to describe HOW you use your strengths in your work, again, aligned with your goal. I chose to focus only on my key strengths, which are communication and activation, and not emphasize other strengths like learning, building relationships, and being productive. This led to the following section in my profile:
“By utilizing my storytelling, ideation, and (technical) writing skills, I make sure there is the commitment from all key players in the organization to grow these transformation and innovation ideas into solutions that bring real value to my clients, their customers, and their people.”
And then, finally, we get to our conclusion by describing WHAT we do. I added the following paragraph to finalize my profile:
“As the European lead for Technical Publication Services at Accenture, I help my clients in transforming their technical publication-related processes. A good example of my work is the Author Assist application, which utilizes a combination of Generative AI and Semantic AI to support technical authors during the impact analysis and early stages of the authoring process.”
In my workshops, I deliberately teach people to write down their profile, instead of practicing short 1- or 2-minute pitches. Having a standard pitch ready for whenever a decision-maker is standing next to you in an elevator might seem handy, but how often does it happen? In my experience, it is better to first build your storyline in a structured manner. The writing process will help you memorize your main points, allowing you to build customized pitches based on the context that you’re in.
Join my workshop
Ready to start working on your personal branding? There will be a 105-minute workshop on personal branding for technical communicators at tcworld conference 2024, allowing a (small) group of technical communicators to kickstart their personal branding journey. The workshop is scheduled on Wednesday, November 6, 2024, from 2:00 to 3:45 PM CET.
During the workshop, we will be using Mentimeter (or a similar tool) to anonymously gather input from participants. This will give us a great insight into how the technical communicators who participated in the workshop want to be seen, what their core drivers are, and what they consider to be their strengths. The results of this workshop will be published in the January 2025 edition of tcworld magazine.