Hi fellow data professional!

I learned one of the most important personal branding lessons in the basement of Arizona State University.

I was seated at my desk in the Post Office/Writing Center as my coworker, a fellow writing tutor, reviewed my resume.

“The content is good, but I won’t remember this. There’s no branding.” She thought for a second.

“You know what? Change the font color to navy. Your brand is now blue.”

I laughed but she was serious and the interaction imprinted on me not the importance of font choice, but the level of thought candidates should invest in making themselves memorable, aka a brand.

To be clear, I’m not a fan of the term “personal brand.” Using “professional brand” is slightly better but still makes me feel like a commodity rather than an employee.

Like many concepts in the corporate realm, cultivating a memorable presence or “brand” requires tact and balance.

If you’re in an early career phase, you want to present yourself as someone who a) can do the work and b) has the willingness and capacity to grow within an organization’s hierarchy.

There is a very real branding risk that actually becomes easier to succumb to as your career advances. And that’s the temptation to tether your professional self to a past identity.

The biggest offenders are the ex-FAANG/MAANG employees. You can easily tell who they are because those 5 letters trail behind their names on LinkedIn like a graduate degree.

While it is true that working at the pinnacle of tech makes you a commodity, at the same time, it says nothing about your contributions and growth potential. All I know is that you can interview very well.

Those that cultivate and grow a professional brand are individuals with clear goals and the ability to carve a path toward achieving them in a balanced, purposeful way.

You don’t want to just sink hours into Leetcode or rack up certifications. You do want to communicate your achievements and how they’d benefit any recruiters/managers lurking on your LinkedIn/GitHub.

Instead of “I just earned my 11th Udemy badge in prompt engineering”

Try: “I earned a prompt engineering badge that allows me to leverage the latest version of Claude to generate data freshness checks on my project pipelines.”

Your public brand ceases to be “sticker collector” and is now “AI-powered intuitive problem solver.”

Notice that you don’t need to design a logo or use a fancy resume template to adopt a professional persona.

But sometimes a font color change can’t hurt.

​Discover a subtle resume tweak I learned in my writing tutor days that will transform your resume from a "to-did" list to a highlight reel.​

Thanks for ingesting,

​
-Zach

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