business.tutsplus.com: First impressions count, even online. That’s why your professional bio is one of the most crucial marketing materials you’ll ever write. Whether it’s on Twitter, LinkedIn, your online portfolio or employer’s website, your professional bio is the first thing people will read to understand who you are and what you do. What you highlight in it will affect how readers perceive you—as a job applicant, public speaker, author, entrepreneur, or whatever it is you do.
4 comments:
If there's one thing I struggle with in terms of professional presentation, it's bios. Most college students aren't taught how to write bios and end up getting their only knowledge from the bios written for high school programs, which are nothing like professional bios, or by reading the bios at productions they attend and trying to copy the formats used there. This article is so helpful and important, especially as someone who has only written local bios before I had any professional experience or any image to show. What was really interesting was the different formats for different jobs. It was interesting reading the other professions' suggested bios and seeing what different things each job requires and prefers, and what information certain types of employment do and don't want or do and don't generally have. There's also so much more thought put into these than I would have thought at first glance. While the bios are only 2 or 3 sentences, there are whole checklists of things to keep in mind when writing them. This is the kind of thing I think I'd want to learn in Metaskills, at least spending one class on it or as part of a larger bio-writing or professional page lesson.
Something I never learned how to do in high school was to write the short professional bio. I thought maybe we would do some of that work in Interpretation & Argument, but we didn't then either. As such, I am beginning to believe that the short professional bio is something many young professionals are forced to learn on their own, sans guidance. It's not until that bio is seen by a hiring team that you know whether it passes muster. Even then, it is unlikely that you will receive feedback on your bio; Rather, you'll know it wasn't total crap if you got the job. As such, I really appreciate the way this article breaks the short professional bio into pieces, describing why it exists, who is supposed to see it, where it is appropriate to use, what should go into the bio itself, and even provides several templates for varying use cases.
Everyone has a story. The parts you tell and the parts you keep hidden say a lot about you as a person. I have a story. Not everyone knows all of my story. I don’t want them to. I only want certain people in my life to know my story. This article can be shoved up there with all the other career advice articles. Everyone has an opinion about how to do something and which way is the right way. The numerous articles on your resume, cover letter, CV, portfolio and now professional Bios. I always say, who are you? Tell me in 30 seconds or less who you are. The elevator speech. It’s called that because in the time it takes to ride an elevator, someone should be able to know what they need to about you. It’s the professional version of “So tell me about yourself”. I always hate getting that question in an interview. At this stage, I need to have a professional bio that is my elevator speech. I like the examples given in the article, but again, I am going to find a way to do it differently.
This was actually very helpful. Typically I find the career articles to be a bit lackluster (not due to selection, just the content itself). However, this article was clear cut and had multiple templates for people in different fields. I also really enjoyed that it has a "fill in the blank" style as well as a clear examples. They made a very good point of how it feels like a tight rope walk to show credit and stand out experiences without sounding like an egotistic maniac. I find that particularly hard when trying to write things down rather than speaking. When interviewing or talking to a person, there is always a more non-verbal way to express humility and a down to earth nature, but when you are on LinkedIn there really isn't much else than what those words are. Additionally, I enjoyed that the author included a portion of meta ideas like your story, what do you bring, and who you are. I always find myself asking those huge, meta question right before application season. It feels nice to have a direction when searching and applying.
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