Your Credibility Impacts Your Personal Brand

The term credibility essentially gravitates to those who understand the principles of marketing and apply the concepts in their lives. Credibility is what you are judged on and what your net value is based upon. It is also a measure of your comprehension of a particular field or practice. The more credibility you bring to the table, the better the chance you will have to succeed in any situation. It can be either spoken, written or personal, but it is formulated by perspective, relationships, knowledge of a field or work accomplished.

Credibility defined: the quality of being believable or trustworthy

If you examine this definition closely, the word trust is mentioned. The idea here is that if your manager trusts and believes you will accomplish a task, then you have credibility on your side. Without the credibility, you might not even get assigned a specific task or even obtain a job. Credibility must be earned, just as your trust in another person must be earned over time. The more credible you are, the more responsibility that your manager will trust you with. Credentials, such as the very elements you would view on a resume, forecasts credibility but is not the only indicator, which is why you still must prove yourself.

As a brand, you must establish a line of credibility with your peers and co-workers, so that they entrust you with projects and the ideas you conceive. Without this element, you will have no mobility or success in life. Credibility is centric in order to build your brand and push your career further.

Losing credibility is losing trust and losing trust is losing a job.

From 2001 till 2006, I desired to grasp a firm foundation in the marketing discipline, holding positions in all of the major areas. These area’s, such as marketing research, advertising, public relations, direct mail, personal selling and graphic design are all integrated into marketing as a whole. My goal here was to become competitive in the job market by demonstrating that, unlike the majority, I understood marketing and it’s related functions, in a variety of different work settings and cultures. Another approach I encountered along the way was to balance off work experience with scholastic activity, so you can cross apply learning. This helped while I juggled working at Reebok, Lycos and taking two classes simultaneously.

Advice to succeed

Never narrow yourself down, until you have built a foundation to work from.

Make the most of your time, be productive and get experiences others do not have the opportunity to have

Stay competitive as much as possible. This means become well balanced. Integrate school with work experiences, while still maintaining a social network.

Picture of Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel

Dan Schawbel is the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and consulting firm. He is the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success (St. Martin’s Press) and the #1 international bestselling book, Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future (Kaplan Publishing), which combined have been translated into 15 languages.

TRENDING AROUND THE WEB

We tend to blame the speeding-up of years on age, but memory researchers point to novelty: a childhood summer felt long because everything in it was new, and new is what the brain records — a repetitive year passes without being filmed

We tend to blame the speeding-up of years on age, but memory researchers point to novelty: a childhood summer felt long because everything in it was new, and new is what the brain records — a repetitive year passes without being filmed

The Vessel

The term for the brain packaging a whole routine into a single automatic unit is chunking, and studies at MIT traced it to the basal ganglia — the deep structure that lets you drive a familiar route while remembering none of it

The term for the brain packaging a whole routine into a single automatic unit is chunking, and studies at MIT traced it to the basal ganglia — the deep structure that lets you drive a familiar route while remembering none of it

The Vessel

The 36 questions supposedly designed to make strangers fall in love came from a study that only set out to measure closeness — and the famous wedding was a single parenthesis

The 36 questions supposedly designed to make strangers fall in love came from a study that only set out to measure closeness — and the famous wedding was a single parenthesis

The Vessel

Writers who reread their own old work and physically cringe aren’t bad judges of their own quality, they’re the only kind of writer who has actually gotten better

Writers who reread their own old work and physically cringe aren’t bad judges of their own quality, they’re the only kind of writer who has actually gotten better

The Blog Herald

The Society of Authors just launched a label that goes on the back of a book jacket reading “Human Authored,” and it runs entirely on an honour code, which means the only thing standing between a reader and the truth is a writer’s word

The Society of Authors just launched a label that goes on the back of a book jacket reading “Human Authored,” and it runs entirely on an honour code, which means the only thing standing between a reader and the truth is a writer’s word

The Blog Herald

A song engineered with a sound therapist to slow your heart rate has been available since 2011 — and almost nobody who talks about anxiety has mentioned it to you

A song engineered with a sound therapist to slow your heart rate has been available since 2011 — and almost nobody who talks about anxiety has mentioned it to you

The Vessel