If you get it right, it can enhance your profile at work, helping you to win interesting projects, promotions and the respect of your colleagues. It will also increase your chances of being the successful candidate at job interviews or attracting clients to your business if you’re self-employed.

Personal branding is a popular theme for online blog posts and articles. Individuals are encouraged to use tried and tested marketing techniques to promote themselves effectively to the world. However, care must be taken to ensure that the process doesn’t go too far, ending with you presenting yourself in an overly polished, corporate way that doesn’t truly represent what you have to offer.

This badged course, Personal branding for career success, will help you to pick your way through the concept of personal branding, developing and refining your own brand, and choosing tools and tactics that allow you to present yourself to current and future employers in an authentic and effective way.

You’ll consider your own values and strengths, identify the key skills employers look for and learn how to present and evidence those skills appropriately, whether you want to raise your profile with your current employer or are looking for something new. Presenting yourself online and in person brings different challenges and you’ll look at a variety of platforms and approaches in more detail.

Enrolling on the course will give you the opportunity to earn an Open University digital badge. Badges are not accredited by The Open University but they're a great way to demonstrate your interest in the subject and commitment to your career, and to provide evidence of continuing professional development.

Once you are signed in, you can manage your digital badges online from My OpenLearn. In addition, you can download and print your OpenLearn statement of participation - which also displays your Open University badge.

The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey . Once you complete the course we would also value your feedback and suggestions for future improvement, in our optional end-of-course survey . Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.

Anyone wishing to provide evidence of their enrolment on this course is able to do so by sharing their Activity Record on their OpenLearn Profile, which is available before completion of the course and earning of the Statement of Participation.

Course learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• Describe what personal branding is and understand how the concept can help you in your career
• Understand how relevant marketing techniques and tactics can be applied to branding a person
• Define your own, authentic personal brand and know who you want to market it to and why
• Promote yourself effectively to employers, both in your workplace and beyond
• Devise an appropriate plan of action to develop and promote your personal brand and enhance your career.