Marketing Your Career -- Become a Proactive Job Seeker, know what is personal branding.

The global economic crisis has hurt all of us in various ways. If you’ve been laid off in recent months, or are unhappy with your present job or keen on a change of job, then you're feeling recession’s effects very directly. It’s discouraging to try to get a job while the news reports continue to announce massive new layoffs, and the resumes you send out lie buried in stacks on hiring managers' desks.

However, your job loss can be an opportunity to reassess your career, figure out what you want to do next, and take more control of your future.

Clearly, the days are gone when one company took care of you from graduation through retirement. While you may still meet people who’ve worked for one company for 30 or 40 years, their situation has little in common with ours. In fact, today’s average worker changes jobs every 3 years. Furthermore, hiring managers now prefer the worker who has changed jobs every 3 years. In the manager's eyes, that's the worker with broad experience. The worker who’s stayed with one company for 30 years is now a questionable bet, unless he or she moved around within the company, continuing to learn and grow.

Since you can't rely on a company to manage your career, you have to manage it yourself.

Coz..."If you don't have a plan, someone else will make your plan." And forming that plan for your career is a critical first step in creating the future you want. You need a strategy for the short term and the long term.

In essence, you need to figure out what you want to become, and develop a plan that will get you there. Your plan may change, but you do need one. That's strategy.

Now what about strategy execution? What do you do to get the job you really want? The answer? Marketing/ branding.

Marketing yourself, or proactive job searching, starts with identifying (1) what you can offer, (2) what distinguishes you from your competition, and (3) who your target market is. Marketing yourself is no different than marketing a product, but the product is you.

To effectively market yourself, you must develop a good understanding of your assets--your skills and personal traits. If you know your strengths, you can market yourself more effectively and with greater confidence, making your strengths available to companies that are looking for them.

You also need to understand the marketplace for people with your skills. This requires research. You may find that you need to go back to school or that people with your skills are employed in industries you hadn't thought of.

When you know your skill set and your market, your job search should rely on two important techniques: informational interviewing and networking.

One technique to apply to your job search is the informational interview. In the informational interview, you contact people who work in a field or company that interests you, and ask them questions to increase your knowledge and understanding. The interview can be done on the phone or in person. You can take this approach: "I'm exploring the kind of work I want to do, and I’d like to learn more about you and your work."

The informational interview is an extension of the research you’ve already done. These interviews should help you learn more about your field of interest and intelligently craft your career plan. You might make a connection through interviewing that leads to a job, but don't approach it that way. Instead, be a researcher. Always thank your interviewees for taking time to help you. If they’re interested, keep them updated on how things work out.

The second key tactic used by the proactive job searcher is networking. Networking is about meeting people--lots of them--and staying in touch. You should focus your networking on people who are in your field of interest. A good way to do this is to attend professional association meetings in your target field. Attend the meetings of these and similar organizations. Use the meetings to develop relationships with the members, and you will gradually build a powerful professional network.

Why do you need a professional network? Because the people in your network care about your success, just as you hopefully care about theirs. Many of them also recognize that helping each other is far more fruitful than treating others as hostile competitors.

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Disclaimer- The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.

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