What’s Your Professional Brand?

“You’re not entitled to anything. You still have to work hard and brand yourself professionally.” So said MonsterTRAK VP and general manager Julie Goldthwait in response to the latest findings from MonsterTRAK’s 2007 Entry-Level Job Survey.

Her comments got me thinking about my brand. Prior to working at Monster, I didn’t think much about brand at all. It wasn’t until a friend looked at my resume that I realized it completely lacked packaging. A summary statement, a few tweaks in wording, and my brand began to take shape. A few weeks later, Monster hired me.

Each morning, I drive one of my three children to school before work. We listen to audio tapes, and at the moment we’re listening to my son’s favorite trilogy for the second time. The trilogy is His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, and in the first book, The Golden Compass, Pullman introduces the trilogy’s heroine, Lyra. She and all the characters in the book, with the exception of the bears, have what Pullman calls demons. These are animals that coexist with their humans, and until the human reaches puberty, they constantly change form, one moment a polecat and the next a mouse. Once the child hits puberty, the demon settles into a form that reflects a person’s nature. Pullman compares these demons to the human soul. Sever them, and the person dies.

Driving into work today, I thought a lot about my demon and what it would be. I have some guesses as to how my children’s demons might settle, but I can’t be sure. My own, I find harder to pinpoint. In his first novel, one of Pullman’s characters says that a person unhappy with his demon is unhappy with himself. Accept your demon’s form, and you begin to accept yourself. I think mine may be some sort of long-beaked, large bird. The awkward, prehistoric Archaeopteryx comes to mind, maybe for their conical head and large beak, I’m not sure.

Which leads me back to brand. In Europe, students decide what they will study long before they do in the United States. By the time European students reach 18, they’ve more or less decided their path of study. In the United States, we give our students more time. This is changing, though. With college admission becoming ever more competitive (just yesterday, the Wall Street Journal noted that colleges rejected a record number of applicants this year), students are having to define their brand earlier and earlier in an effort to distinguish themselves from the competition.

While I’m a fan of the American system myself, I’m beginning to wonder if we are pushing our children to define their brand too young. Even as a 39-year-old, I’m still tweaking my brand. Yes, my demon might have settled into the ungainly Archaeopteryx form, but isn’t the most magical of children’s qualities the transformative power of their imagination, their desire to explore, something we adults often lack?

When I build my company -- there’s still time, no matter what my brand dictates -- I’m going to hire a student who believes in that transformative power of imagination. If that means having experimented with different brands, they’ll be all the more attractive to me. Drive is admirable, but so is a willingness to take risks. One without the other amounts to me to a demon that’s settled too young. But then what do I know. My demon, if it is an Archaeopteryx, is sadly extinct. Haven't you heard?

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