How MBA Applicants can develop a Personal Brand?

A number of b-school applicants are hesitant to think of themselves as a product or brand. However, in order to find out the best MBA programme to match their unique profile, they need to take the time to examine their personal qualities, aspirations and values.

You can put it into other ways as well. Suppose if you are entrusted with the task of creating a marketing campaign for a new car, and if you decided to highlight the seat warmers and sound systems of the vehicle, when the potential customers are looking for fuel economy, then your marketing message may not be able to create frenzy in the market.

The drawbacks in preparing your brand message for MBA application are similar. What you need is to think like a marketing strategist and develop a personal brand only after identifying its strengths. Here are three exercises to help you do it effectively.

Make a brag sheet

Though the practice of bragging is usually disapproved of in the real world but when it is about effectively sending out a set of messages you eventually want to communicate to admissions committee, the best way to begin is by writing down most unique, wonderful, exciting things about yourself. Consider it as brag-storming.

You should know that admissions committees look for pleasing candidates with experience of life and those who have chased their passions and achieved their professional as well as personal goals.

Create stories

MBA applicants should sift through a wide range of life experiences and find out their core strength. Leading off with what applicants perceive as their strengths and then searching for example stories to back things up is not a fruitful idea. 

You can write stories about personal successes, leadership achievements within and outside of professional life, instances when your actions made a difference or times when you initiated to solve a problem. Do not hesitate to jot down setbacks or failure, as the strategies you made to overcome them are the best supporter of your success in business world.

Discover stories for strengths

To separate out your stories, you need to discover the aspects of your skills, strengths, talents and character contributing to your achievements. You should ask yourself how your life is shaped after certain experiences or the strengths, attributes and talents assisted you in making a difference.

Usually, the goal of a traditional marketing plan is to come up with a product in effective and thoughtful manner. Here, the product is MBA applicant. The goal is awareness about the self, and going through your accomplishment is of greater help. You can focus on the best MBA strategy once these factors are clarified.

Are you a Proficient Learner to Proceed to the World of Business?

Business is something that requires knowledge and relevant skills for obvious reasons. So, what should be your next step accordingly? Looking for a good business school and enrolling in a MBA course and you think your job is done? Are you sure you are going to retain each and every lesson you have learnt right from the beginning till the end of the course? Are you confident you will be able to make use of each and every business application to your existing job?

Well, you can bet because it’s not a child’s play. What’s more important is to know the way to learn, and it’s such a skill that would never leave you unemployed. Forget those days when your dad preferred doing one or maximum two jobs through his entire lifetime. There were no options, there were no such big employers who could ensure sky-high pay packages, and there were no scope of making career changes as school-leavers do today. 

Learn in the right manner & adopt the right strategies

As per the current scenario, over 30% of the Fortune 500 companies keep disappearing on a yearly basis while almost 9 out of 10 organisations end up in losses by not even covering 5 years. So, the majority of those unsuccessful ventures have been either due to the failure to learn in the right manner or due to the failure to adapt strategies that should have been taken in time.

You might have obtained quality education from a world class school, you might have been fortunate to study under the most learned men; but this does not mean that you should take a break from learning. Rather, try to learn something that relates to a thriving industry and not the one that might close doors. Of course, what your college or university has taught you are valuable, but what’s crucial now is studying something relevant that would always let you take the high road.

Now, let’s come to the 21^st century schools and find out whether they carry any negative undertone. Lectures, books and blackboards are the three key sources of monotonousness that make students inattentive in a classroom. Don’t get it wrong. What it means that even if these sources make students attentive in classrooms, some just don’t want to listen, and even if some listen, they fail to absorb information. This is reality, accept it or not.

Be a satisfied learner

One might prefer learning visually through pictures or diagrams, while one might love participating in discussions, making debates, listening to audiotapes or exchanging verbal instructions. To be precise, it completely depends on you as what learning process you would prefer to complete a course. At the end, you must be a satisfied learner and you can then only acquire confidence to multiply your work experiences and become a knowledgeable business professional.

As far as today’s organisations are concerned, recruiting and thereafter retaining potential candidates are quite challenging. In fact, a lot of companies are still searching for answers as how can they inspire their valuable employees. How would they reward and retain their employees, and most importantly, what would they do to ignite their skills that can benefit the organisation?

Learning is possible without attending a campus

Like the majority of multinationals take initiatives to provide in-house training for their employees who gather all those associated skills in the process, there are international business schools that give individuals the opportunity to adopt such skills through top up university programmes. Now, these programmes include assignments and assessments completing which individuals top-up to their chosen university qualification through distance learning. Moreover, no campus attendance is required and those looking forward to fast track MBA find these programmes beneficial.

So, what we understood here is that one doesn’t need to be in a state of monotony in order to learn something. In fact, there are so many ways through which quality learning is possible. It’s therefore advisable to first focus on what are you going to learn, why are you going to learn and how are you going to learn. Once you have these answers, learning will never seem a mammoth task.