Go From Invisible to In-Demand
Grow your personal brand within your company, within your community and on social media to grow your career.
Welcome!
Hi this is John with this week’s Developing Skills - Skills for Developers looking to develop their careers.
If there is a topic you’d like to see covered, please let me know by replying to this email📧
Tip of The Week: How To Go From Invisible to In-Demand
In today’s fiercely competitive tech industry, personal branding is an important tool for software engineers and founders. It influences how others understand your skills, values, and contributions.
A personal brand can help you build credibility, grow your network, and open up opportunities - whether you're looking to advance your career, attract collaborators, or promote a product.
But how do you build you personal brand?
There’s two main ways…
In Person
Know what you stand for - your values, strengths, and what kind of work or problems you’re passionate about. Be ready to communicate this clearly in conversations.
Show up consistently - Attend meetups, conferences, and community events regularly. Being present in the same circles helps people associate your name and face with your area of expertise.
Listen and contribute - Ask thoughtful questions, share relevant experiences, and offer help when it’s useful. This builds trust and shows that you're engaged and credible.
Follow up - After meeting someone, follow up with a short message. Keep in touch occasionally by sharing something useful or checking in.
On Social Media
Here’s the 10 step process I’ve used to build a personal brand on LinkedIn (193k) and X (11k):
Determine your goal - why do you want to build a personal brand?
Identify the relevant audience - who do you want to reach (that can help you with 1)?
Make your profile interesting to the audience - be credible.
Identify people you want in your network - use the search to find people you want to connect with to help you with your goal.
Reach out to people and build relationships - talk to them as a person.
Share original content that resonates with your audience - show people what you know, what you can do, what you are interested in or what you are learning.
Engage with your audience - See 5! It’s a social media!
Comment on other people’s content - you guessed it, more networking and building relationships.
Build a content pipeline - make it easy to create content regularly by adopting systems.
Level up your copywriting game - the better you write, the more likely people are to read.
That’s it!
Want to do it with a cohort of other people and discuss it with them and me live? Join the course I’m running that starts May 13th. Details here: https://maven.com/coding-challenges/linkedin-for-engineers.
As a reader of Developing Skills you can get 20% off with the code: DSREADER
Regards, John