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One of my close friends at work asked me the other day what advice I had around building a brand. Building a brand is a key skill that you learn as a management consultant — in fact, building the right brand for you can significantly accelerate your career not just in management consulting but in general (though a lot of my experience is in management consulting).
Building a brand helps you:
- Get your name out there without doing a lot of self promotion (this includes getting onto projects that you want to get on, working with people you want to work with, getting customers and more)
- Help provide a direction for what you want to do and work on
- Provides you with ‘safety’ in case you make mistakes
Early on, when I started at Deloitte, there was an all hands session in consulting where the partners fielded anonymous questions from all of the consultants. One of the questions seemed innocuous but little did I realize that the answer was one that helped my career the most. The question was “how do you build a brand at the analyst level when you do not know what you want to do and have limited expertise in any field?”
It was a really good question because a lot of the previous conversations and discussions with the partners talked about the…
