Personal branding has recently become a hot topic, with interest peaking during the Covid-19 pandemic. Suddenly, people had to start looking outside the box to promote their skills and attributes online, as in-person meetings took a backseat.
Just like skilled professionals, trainees need to be able to develop their own personal brands. As a company, investing time in helping them establish these can be worthwhile.
A personal brand is defined as the unique combination of values, skills, and experiences that make trainees who they are. As summarized in the Best Traineeship standard of Personal Branding: It is how they present themselves to the company.
Trends In Personal Branding
Within the Best Traineeship competition, one of our standards is the attention companies pay to the personal brands of trainees. In 2020, the award for personal branding was won by the NN Group, which set a high standard. Our judges were impressed by NN’s individualized approach, identifying each trainee’s skills and building on these rather than creating a single mold that everyone needs to comply with.
Our research through our benchmark survey shows the increasing importance of developing personal brands as part of the traineeship program, rather than letting it evolve naturally. But why do we need to make this a part of the traineeship program? We’ve given our top reasons below.
Return on Investment
As Jeff Bezos said: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” While we immediately associate this with customers and clients rather than employees, the same is true for what our team says about the company. The way they speak about their work, teammates, and role in the company directly reflects your company’s brand.
Investing the time in your trainees to help them develop their own talents is a positive reflection of your own company’s values by displaying and encouraging their evolution in the workplace. This becomes an asset to your company through attention to detail and helping them build their own work profiles. As they grow stronger in their authentic self, your company’s brand grows more robust. It is a win-win situation.
Your Trainees Are Unique
Taking the time to ensure that your trainees recognize and learn about their unique skills and attributes means that you can develop their strengths to benefit them and their role in your company. It becomes a valuable resource, a database of sorts, that houses and protects the individual talents within your company.
But the benefit also lies in building these talents within your trainees. When they feel their skills and attributes are valued and developed, this becomes a positive experience they may go on to share within their networks.
A great example is our 2020 Best Traineeship: Personal Branding winners, the NN Group. Their individualized approach to developing their trainees and nurturing their innate qualities stood out to our judges. By facilitating individual talents, the trainees can build their own unique career brands and encourage loyalty to the company that values who they actually are.
Creating Tomorrow’s Leaders
Focusing on the ability to develop the innate skills and attributes of your trainees and building on their strengths fosters their personal brand now and in the future. It additionally makes it clear to all what the most effective career progression should be.
Clarine Deijnen of Best Traineeship says, “Everyone is unique and equal.”
Branding is no longer solely about your company and your business. Encouraging your employees to build their brands and fostering those unique skills they bring to your company makes your company stand out from the crowd. And in this time of unprecedented employee shortages, is that not a win you would want to benefit from?
As stated earlier, their personal brand also becomes part of your company’s identity. The investment you made will initially benefit your team through sharing expertise and skills and building the future workforce. It develops employees who are passionate about contributing to the workplace. But after the traineeship, they will also bring these skills to their future roles. As our research shows through our annual benchmarking, Traineeships have a higher loyalty for long-term employee commitment, so ensuring that your traineeship emphasizes developing Personal Branding can increase that loyalty even further.
Take the time to invest in the personal brands of your trainees and employees. It’s worth it.
Do you have a traineeship you’d like to showcase in our 2022 Best Traineeship awards? Is your passion for developing the personal brands of tomorrow’s workforce? Register now for this year’s competition.
As part of your entry, you’ll receive a personalized benchmark report on your company’s performance, containing valuable insights into performance analysis, competitive comparisons, continuous improvement opportunities, and future trend identifications.
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