What about your self-promotion skills?

Companies invest time an effort to promote their services and products, their intention is to position themselves in the market in a way that the consumer/user gets to know their brand and market value.

In the same way when you are focusing on developing a professional career, you will not only require technical competences but also you will need to learn how to sell your value  to national and international markets. Many professionals and especially the ones that I have been working with-specialized engineers- are in need of developing their self-promotion ability. Self-promotion skills will enable them to sell their technical knowledge and their soft-skills.

These 6 tips can help you to initiate an action strategy to increase your self-promotion skills:

1.Don´t assume that your manager knows what you do. From time to time you will need to update him and tell him or her your accomplishments. Add LinkedIn recommendations from previous and current employers, they will talk about your contribution to the company.

2.Embrace the difference between articulating and bragging. Don´t be shy about your contributions. You can participate in LinkedIn discussions, blogs and networking events. If you are searching for new job opportunities this will help you to get noticed.

3.Adopt an accomplishment mind-set and narrative. Make a list of your accomplishments or contributions, if you don´t start registering them and being conscious of them you won´t be able to show your value. You can register the information in a diary or notebook, the important thing is to keep this information and to be able to share it when it´s appropriate.

4.Quantify your worth: How much money did you help to save? What problem or issue did you solve? What impact did you have on handling difficult clients? Did you participate in a team project with outstanding results?

5.Start tracking down your accomplishments and contributions: review old CV´s, business plans, journals…material that can bring some light into past experiences and that you can share as accomplishments or skills learned.

6.Practice makes perfect: try to use the 3 part accomplishment statement, an introduction, middle and end. For example “ I created a digital system that allowed my compàny to save 300 hours of weekly work and 6 millons dollars annually”.

Your accomplishments are relevant, not only the ones you can quantify but also the ones that you can consider more qualitative; a positive feedback from a client, showing interpersonal skills –adaptability, resilience and perseverance-. To start using this “mind-set” it´s important to collect the information you need during your activities or work experience and then to put in practice your ability to explain it to others.

If you want to get more detailed information you can access to the original slide-show here.