6 Tips for Developing Your Personal Brand on Social Media

by Yetunde Oshinkale

WES Ambassador Yetunde Oshinkale is a doctorate student in educational psychology in the U.S. In this blog post, she shares six social media strategies that will help you build your network and develop your own personal brand.

You can improve how you represent yourself—your “brand”—on social media. Your online presence can be consistently professional across platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Make the most of your social media profiles by including these six elements:

1. A compelling and attractive photo
2. A clear brand definition
3. A compelling story about your professional expertise
4. A clear focus on professional and business connections
5. An outstanding portfolio
6. Your memberships in relevant professional organizations

How to Use Social Media Sites to Their Fullest

Social networking sites also offer online meeting places where professionals can connect with current and former colleagues. These sites offer professionals the potential to increase the number of their business connections and deepen the connections they already have. The sites can also foster the discussion of business ideas and enable users to search for jobs and recruit new hires.

Social media strategies have the potential to promote interaction, engagement, and network expansion. Overall, they will increase your professional opportunities.

Top-performing professionals join LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networking sites to engage with their peers and exchange ideas. As a result, these platforms become a vehicle through which professionals elevate their profiles. The control you exert over your presence and image on social media, along with the professionalism with which you respond to opportunities online, can impact your brand.

Use the following social strategies to promote your expertise:

• An attractive profile photo: Upload a professional, attractive photograph of yourself in which you are smiling. Crop the picture perfectly.
• A clear brand definition: Describe your areas of expertise. Demonstrate your vision, mission, and core values. Write an attention-grabbing headline such as: “Motivated, experienced, client-focused sales manager with over 23 years driving sales.”
• A compelling story about your professional expertise: Highlight your achievements—how you have distinguished yourself from your peers, and how you have contributed to higher productivity and profit at your company. Share your career objectives. The more you share about yourself, your credentials, and your core values, the more your profile will make an impression.
• A clear focus on professional or business connections: Be strategic about increasing the number of your first-degree connections—the people you know directly. The more first-degree connections you have, the more second- and third-degree connections you will have. The idea is not to amass a huge number of connections but to connect with the people who are in your field. The LinkedIn search algorithm will be able to find a place you at the top of the search results most appropriate for you. Follow a few LinkedIn influencers to keep abreast of news and insights from leaders in fields you care about.
• An outstanding portfolio: With the LinkedIn professional portfolio feature, applicants can show prospective employers much more about their capabilities than résumés ever could. You can show samples of your work and presentations via images and video you embed in your LinkedIn profile.
• Professional memberships: Including your memberships in professional organizations on your LinkedIn or Facebook page presents a great opportunity to optimize keywords in your profile. A professional university administrator, for example, could include membership in the American Association of University Administrators.

In Summary

Creating a professional online brand presence will help you stand out when competing for jobs. It will also allow you to demonstrate your goals, skills, and any other outstanding qualities. For example, those might include being a strong leader, team player, communicator, writer, or listener. By making the most of your online presence, you are sure to set yourself up for success in the professional realm where you hope to excel.

Source: WES

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Identifying Transferable Skills to Build Your Career

by Joanna Samuels

Welcome to Canada! One of the first things you can do to make your résumé and job application stronger is to identify your transferable skills. Let’s define the term “transferable skills” before we identify your specific skill set. Doing so will allow us to showcase your skills in your résumé and job interviews more effectively.

Step 1: Understand the Meaning of Transferable Skills

Transferable skills can be used in many different occupations and work environments. They could be natural talents that are refined through work or hobbies or education. Transferable skills provide flexibility to move from one position to another, or from one occupation or industry to another. Math skills, the ability to write engaging and effective reports, customer service skills, etc. are all examples of transferable skills.

Step 2: Make a List of Your Transferable Skills

The following categories are just a few areas in which you can identify transferable skills:

• Communications
  • Can I explain ideas or concepts to others in a clear and understandable way?
  • Am I good at helping people work together to reach a common goal?
  • Do I often find creative concepts to persuade others to follow a specific path through media, special events, or personal involvement?
  • Can I write effective and easily understood e-mails and reports? Do I use language, grammar, and punctuation effectively to make my point?
  • Am I comfortable speaking in public?
  • Can I deliver a message to an audience with the intent of informing and/or entertaining?

• Leadership and management
  • Am I able to negotiate in order to bring about a settlement or agreement among groups with different interests?
  • Am I good at decision making by identifying and choosing the best option from a variety of alternatives?
  • How often do I delegate, and do I delegate effectively?
  • Can I meditate to resolve or settle differences between two or more conflicting parties?
  • Do I like to organize and pull together elements of a project or program into an orderly, functional, structured whole?
  • Have I ever designed strategic planning or policy to carry out a course of action?
• Intellectual/analytical
  • Am I able to solve problems by tracking and identifying the sources of the problem and providing a solution?
  • Do I enjoy collecting, classifying, and processing data?
  • Am I able to conduct research using observation, comprehension of written sources, or interviewing for discovery or application?
  • Do I like to analyze data, ideas, or projects, and identify their importance?
  • Can I create a budget by planning or scheduling expenses and revenues?

Step 3: Analyze the Language in Job Descriptions that Match Your Career Goals

Research job postings in your desired field of work and select the most appropriate words to describe your transferable skills. Target a few well-written postings in your field through websites like Indeed.com, Glassdoor.com, and Linkedin.com.

Look for keywords or phrases and match them to your skills. For example, as a banker, you had to have excellent time management, work well under pressure, and listen attentively when dealing with customers. These are highly desirable transferable skills for any employer.

Step 4: Give Concrete Examples of Your Transferable Skills in Your Résumé, Social Media Profile, and Portfolio

For example Expertise in meeting tight deadlines that helped my company secure US$2 million portfolios of business from a large Fortune 500 company.

Step 5: Don’t Let Your Skills Get Lost in Translation

Once you have prepared your résumé with your transferrable skills, qualifications, and other information required by the job postings, I recommend working with an employment counselor at organizations like JVS Toronto to edit your work. If you are a permanent resident living in Toronto or are living overseas with an immigration visa to Canada, check out our CanPrep program.

I wish you much success in your job search and career growth in Canada.

Joanna

Source: WES

Hola Canada -Episodio 6- Don Fernando Torres en Canada

Bigger population smaller employment gap; immigrants driving population growth in Canada

Statistics Canada data show that immigration is the main driver of population growth and that the employment gap is the smallest it has been in a decade.

By Shelby Thevenot

Most of Canada’s recent population growth has been thanks to immigrants, and as a result, the country is becoming increasingly diverse. There is also evidence that the employment gap between immigrant workers and Canadian-born workers is narrowing.

Statistics Canada says 82 percent of Canada’s population growth between 2018 and 2019 was the result of international migration. Many Canadian provinces are pushing for immigration in an effort to propel population growth.

The natural population growth is expected to continue on a downward trend. Population gains are expected to be driven by international migration.

More immigrants in the workforce, diversity rising in cities

The employment gap between new immigrants and Canadian-born workers is the smallest it has been in a decade. The employment rate gap decreased from 19 percentage points in 2010 to 13 percentage points in 2018.

Recent immigrants are also experiencing faster growth in employment rates than the Canadian-born. Newcomers saw their employment rate increased by 7.7 percentage points from 2010 to 2018, compared to 2.1 percentage points for Canadians.

About half of all immigrants have at least a bachelor’s degree. Over half, 54 percent, of those in Canada between the ages of 25 and 64 with a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) degree are immigrants.

Visible minority populations are expected to continue on an upward trend, particularly in major cities.

By 2036 up to 40 percent of the population aged 15-64 is expected to belong to a visible minority group. Statistics Canada also predicts that up to 31 percent of the population will have a mother tongue other than English or French, and up to 16 percent will have a non-Christian religion.

Source: CIC news