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Building your personal brand for expat life


19 August 2021
 

If you and your partner are not letting an overseas assignment impact your family planning, make sure your international health insurance includes maternity benefits.

If you don’t have maternity cover, you will need to research having a baby through the public health system in your country of residence. If you opt to pay for private care, you may be left with significant medical bills. 

Your personal brand is what will set you apart from other candidates when applying for a role. It helps to strengthen your expat profile and can even give companies and recruiters cause to headhunt you for a role.
Many expat roles require highly skilled candidates with a specific set of skills and multinational companies often have large hiring teams to search for the ideal applicant. By building your profile online you are making yourself visible to these recruiters and by highlighting your experience and skills you can stand out from the competition in your application and potentially strike a deal for a more attractive salary package. It will demonstrate your full potential to an employer.
There are a number of steps you can take to build and improve your personal brand. 
To create your personal brand you need to know who you are and what your skills, values, abilities and passions are too. Some things to consider include:
Transferable skills refer to the skills you have that can be used across a variety of roles. These could include leadership, languages, time management, organisation and communication. 
Special skills are skills that not many other people have, and they can distinguish you in some way from the people around you. These can include storytelling, being a good judge of character, knowledge of other cultures and memory skills.
What interests you most? Travel, sports, reading, exercising etc. Choose what you are interested in.
Being clear about your values is very important when creating your personal brand. If your family is what you value most, a set work life balance is important for you. If career progression is what you value most you will need to prioritise work in your life. You will need to sit back and reflect on your own values to find out what is important to you. 
Values and goals are closely linked. What are your expat career goals
What are your ideal working conditions? Remote working, in the office or hybrid?

Being consistent with your values and actions is what will give you authenticity in front of others. It means being consistent with the time it takes you to respond to emails and phone calls. It also means regularly posting and updating your blog and social media accounts. 

Being consistent will bring you good results whether you are looking for a better job or if you want to attract new clients.

What you offer and the kind of person you are will interest a certain kind of person but not everyone. You need to be very clear about who those people are. Study and research your audience and address them with your message. If you help your audience achieve their goals, they will help you achieve yours.

In terms of personal branding, assets are the things you own that will communicate your brand message to your target audience. Assets include things like your website, blog, Twitter username and your LinkedIn profile. Offline assets cover things like business cards and traditional brochures.

You will need to have a website with a strong domain that relates to your brand or field of work with a blog that is updated regularly with valuable content that displays your skills and knowledge. You also need to have social media accounts that are updated frequently and connect with your peers. 

You should also attend events to engage in networking, give presentations, workshops etc to create more connections and make yourself known. 

Creating a personal brand doesn’t happen overnight. It will take time and will need nurturing and updating throughout. By staying persistent with your personal brand you will reap the benefits such as:
 

  • Being well known by your peers and employers in your field
  • Attracting opportunities 
  • Being headhunted
  • Achieving your goals
  • Increasing your salary 
  • Standing out from the competition
  • Finding the job you want

There are a number of expat insurance covers to consider as part of your plans. Discover more items you should consider looking into prior to leaving your home country in our moving overseas checklist today.