Book Review: Career Distinction

Personal branding is very important in today’s web 2.0 world. In a world where anyone can google you and people change jobs multiple times in a decade, your reputation and brand are essential to your career. If you’ve never thought about personal branding or you’ve wondered how to go about it, then you should read Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand. It offers some concrete advise and metrics for setting up your personal brand and measuring how well you are doing. For example, they recommend you google your name and check the number of accurate results you have.  They make recommendations like you should have 5,000-50,000 if you are "a vice president, acknowledged thought leader, highly regarded consultant or subject-matter expert." (I did well on that one, a search for "Stormy Peters" returns 161,000 results where 98 of the first 100 are me.) Their suggestions ranged from creating home pages to public speaking to what type of clothes to wear.

All that said, if you are already an expert in career branding, you might be disappointed. The book is only 192 pages and it’s full of white space and quotes. (24 of the pages are either blank or title pages.) And in a lot of places where more detail would have been helpful, they refer you to a workbook that’s not included with the book.

In summary, Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand is a great introduction and overview of personal career branding but should be combined with the workbook or they should come out with a Career Distinctions 201.