Product Description

Praise for Career Distinction

"Hands down, this book is the bible on branding for your career!"
-- Susan Britton Whitcomb, author of Job Search Magic

"As a professional resume writer and career coach, I have extolled the concept of personal branding for my clients for years. Now, for the first time ever, I have an outstanding resource to recommend--Career Distinction by William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson. This book details the concept of personal branding in a magnificent and easy-to-digest presentation that is a must-buy for every serious job seeker."
-- Wendy S. Enelow, CCM, MRW, JCTC, CPRW Executive Director of the Career Masters Institute

"Arruda and Dixson are widely respected in the global career coaching community as gurus who not only teach but live the personal branding model, and their expertise and passion show through on every page of this practical, indispensable book. I highly recommend it to all who want to distinguish themselves from the competition."
-- L. Michelle Tullier, PhD, Vice President of Right Management and author of The Unofficial Guide to Landing a Job

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64331 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780470128183
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From the Inside Flap

As a professional, your reputation is your most valuable career asset. Whether you're climbing the ladder at your current company or seeking a new job, in today's fast-paced work environment, you must proactively and continuously position yourself for success. Your credibility, visibility, personality, and personal style all make up your brand. Build and nurture your personal brand and you'll make yourself a must-have, can't-fail professional—and you'll do it without having to be someone you're not.

Career Distinction outlines the proven personal branding process and provides case studies of successful professionals that will help you not only survive, but thrive, in today's dynamic and ultracompetitive workplace. You'll learn to manage your brand with innovative tools that enable you to differentiate yourself and stand out from your peers.

In this definitive step-by-step guide, career and personal brand management experts Arruda and Dixson show you how to:

• Brand yourself for career success

• Determine how others perceive you

• Develop your unique value proposition

• Define your target audience

• Tell your brand story

• Express yourself clearly and consistently

• Build and manage your online identity

• Stay on-message and on-brand every day

• Increase your "career karma"

The increasing pace of change in the business world gives you less time than ever to make your professional mark. Career Distinction demonstrates how to express who you are and the value you bring to your organization—branding you as an indispensable, memorable, and unique professional. Success takes more than just hard work; brand yourself and watch your career soar.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Career Distinction

"Hands down, this book is the bible on branding for your career!"
— Susan Britton Whitcomb, author of Job Search Magic

"As a professional resume writer and career coach, I have extolled the concept of personal branding for my clients for years. Now, for the first time ever, I have an outstanding resource to recommend—Career Distinction by William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson. This book details the concept of personal branding in a magnificent and easy-to-digest presentation that is a must-buy for every serious job seeker."
— Wendy S. Enelow, CCM, MRW, JCTC, CPRW Executive Director of the Career Masters Institute

"Arruda and Dixson are widely respected in the global career coaching community as gurus who not only teach but live the personal branding model, and their expertise and passion show through on every page of this practical, indispensable book. I highly recommend it to all who want to distinguish themselves from the competition."
— L. Michelle Tullier, PhD, Vice President of Right Management and author of The Unofficial Guide to Landing a Job

About the Author
William Arruda—dubbed the "Personal Branding Guru" by media and clients alike—combined his international branding expertise with his passion for people to found Reach, the world's first human branding consultancy. A sought-after global spokesperson on personal branding, he counts many of the Fortune 100 companies as clients. He has appeared on the BBC, Discovery Channel, Fox News Live, and in Time magazine.

Kirsten Dixson is a career management consultant who is an authority on building credible online identities for career success. She founded Brandego® and is a partner in Reach, where she established an online identity training program for personal brand strategists. She delivers keynote speeches and serves as a media resource on career technology topics.

Customer Reviews

A great book for improving your brand and career prospects
I've been contemplating switching jobs and industries. A friend recommended this book to me and I just finished it. This book will change the way you think about yourself and how to approach your career. In a world where employers can "google" any prospect, everyone needs to think about their career identity as they climb the corporate ladder. This book allows you to create and control your business identity and will teach you how to : brand yourself, build your online business identity; create your own story and goals. A must read for anyone looking for a new job-- or improving the way their current employer views them.

Branding for Executives
This is a must read book for all executives! Personal branding takes executives to a higher level where they are projecting an authentic, unique, compelling brand that sets them apart from the competition.

As an executive coach, I use Career Distinction's fabulous branding process of Extract (chapters 4-7), Express (chapters 8-11) and Exude (chapters 12-14) with all of my clients.

Here's what Carlos, one of my executive clients in Minneapolis, MN says about his experience with Career Distinction's 3-step branding process: "I have a much clearer view of what I do, how I do it, and why it works for me. Instead of just being successful professionally and making money, I have a much better understanding of how to attain fulfillment, happiness, and balance. Today my work is still a fundamental part of my life but is no longer the center of my life. My branding statement is: `A passionate, multicultural, and enterprising leader who recognizes and seizes opportunities, exhibits savvy in relating to others, and achieves dramatic results by orchestrating, negotiating, and closing win-win deals.' And, my tagline is `Strategy-Orchestration-Negotiation.'"

Total eye-opener for me and my personal brand.
Quick, name the most important brand in the world.

Now imagine you are solely in charge of managing everything about that brand -- from marketing brand value and story to managing public perception and identity. Get it wrong and your brand suffers. Build and manage it correctly and you win.

Whatever your response was to the above question, unless you've read the book (read on), odds are you were probably thinking of a corporate brand. Possibly the brand you currently work for or some multi-national, mega-corp perhaps. Maybe a soft-drink company, fast food chain or computer giant entered your head when you read through the question.

Think closer to home.

The most important brand in the world of course is (insert your name here). "You" are the most important brand out there and that is precisely why you would read Career Distinction by William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson.

"One thing that links the most successful professionals at all levels is that they take a proactive approach to managing their careers. People who are ahead of the game don't wait for a career emergency to activate their network or update their resume. As Arruda and Dixson explain, you have to make career management a habit." ~ Martin Yate, Author of Knock `em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide

The book takes the reader through a three-step process to evaluate and take control of his/her personal brand, both online and off.

STEP ONE: EXTRACT -- UNEARTH YOUR UNIQUE PROMISE OF VALUE

During this section, the reader goes through extensive, but easy to accomplish exercises that are designed to figure out what his/her current brand looks like and what his/her current strengths and weaknesses are.

It's easy to fool ourselves during these types of self-evaluating exercises to arrive on paper who we want to be or who we think we are, thus rendering the entire exercise useless in any real-world self-extracting process. The Career Distinction book along with the accompanying workbook and Web site knows this -- so the authors have set up an automated system for you to get real-world feedback from your friends, family, peers, colleagues, etc. In conjunction with the Web site, part of the exercise is to send via e-mail an evaluation allowing your peer group to anonymously rate, describe and evaluate you as a brand.

The Career Distinction site houses and tabulates all of the returned data from your peer group and it allows you to get an accurate assessment of the brand you are giving off as apposed to the brand image you want to be giving off. This extraction process is worth the cost of the book alone.

STEP TWO: EXPRESS -- COMMUNICATE YOUR BRAND TO YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

Now that the book has carefully walked you through the process of discovering the brand you want to be known as and the brand you have been giving off to others (this can be the same image or surprisingly different), it is now time to express the on-brand image you will be in control of going forward. Is the world ready for your new brand?

In this stage the authors help you to build your offline marketing tools (resume, cover letters, printed bios, etc.) Keeping everything on-brand is now easier, manageable, and in focus thanks to the extract process in earlier chapters.

If you didn't already realize how seriously important your online brand is already, you will by chapter 10 and 11. Enough to make you regret any drunken college pictures you have floating around online. No worries though. By then end of step two (Express) you will have both your offline and online branding strategies in place and on-message. Hopefully you won't have too much repair work to do from past "digital dirt" as the book calls it.

With a firm understanding of your brand, your target audience and a strategy to reach your audience, all that is left is the final step.

STEP THREE: EXUDE -- MANAGE YOUR BRAND ENVIRONMENT

Step three is by far the most common sense of the three steps and should be a quick read. There is nothing to figure out or evaluate here -- all of the heavy-lifting has been done already. Step three is in place to hammer home the concepts of staying on message and delivering your brand in everything you do.

There is also a chapter on creating a "visual identity" (which I didn't find that helpful) and finally the book wraps up with a lite chapter on professional networking and building what the authors call good "career karma."

Career karma, in terms of professional networking, is the act of giving out more than what you take in the line of helping others professionally. The book is absolutely correct in the fact that if all you worry about is giving to others, you will eventually end up with far more in return than if you were to keep score and always be looking to take professionally from others.

And that's it in a nutshell. Published in 2007 originally, the book hadn't made it across my desk until a few months ago. If you haven't heard of it and you are at all concerned about building and maintaining a personal brand for career management sake, Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand is a must read. Find one used on Amazon and the knowledge it brings to you over the life of your career will pay for itself thousands of time over.