How good are you at selling yourself?

I’m feeling curious about the British career landscape. I am noticing a real gap for a certain band of people. Whilst I will be making generalisations in this blog I do think they resonate with some truths. 
With the loss of the career for life, and as a direct result of the recession, there comes the career path that individuals need to manage themselves. This involves being able to ‘sell’ yourself and lots of clients say they find this prospect frightening. I did too…! 
It was really frightening to promote myself to begin with & kind of went against everything I had been raised to believe. It seems like graduates these days are being supported to know their worth….. And too right considering what the debts accrued in the process.
This however leaves a gap of about 15 to 20 years between ‘the career for life’ and the current upskilled & confident newbies on the block, where self promotion was considered ‘arrogant….. ‘
This can leave people between the ages of 30-50 pretty vulnerable. We have neither the career for life nor the innate belief that we have the right to push forward to claim the roles we want…..
So how can we manage this? One way is to dig deep and really identify your passion. When you know what drives you, then it is your passion and the resultant expertise that you are promoting. Whilst this may still feel somewhat counterintuitive to those of us generation X types. Walking into a room and saying ‘look at what I care about, look at what I value and look at what I leaned” is perhaps less threatening than walking into that same arena and saying ‘look at how brilliant I am’.
Maybe this helps us to step forward because if we are promoting ourselves in service of a purpose or passion, then it’s not ‘all about us’, it’s about the benefits of our work for others. Now there’s a generous thing!

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