If You Build It, and Keep Building on It, They Will Come
Written by Jeanette Walton, Career Brand Consultant
Jeanette is spreading the word about the essentiality of career branding for all professionals. As a Career Brand Consultant, she has pioneered a career branding framework, amongst other educational resources, to amplify the use of career branding to cut through and stand out.
I’ve been doing a fair bit of reflecting, reconsidering, and reminiscing as another calendar year comes to a close. What has worked well for me as both a business and a brand in 2025, and what hasn’t worked so well? What could I change or improve in the new year? And what should I keep pushing forward with in 2026? As a sole-trading business owner for 15+ years, I understand how important it is to keep refreshing and redirecting, to ensure that you remain contemporary and that you communicate commitment, agility, and ongoing understanding to target audiences.
“Your career is like a garden. It can hold an assortment of life’s energy that yields a bounty for you. You do not need to grow just one thing in your garden. You do not need to do just one thing in your career.” – Jennifer Ritchie Payette, co-author of Modular Career Design
Foundational branding
While I have continued to expand my brand channels and business offerings in 2025, experimenting with additional options such as writing for Brainz Magazine, starting The Human Behind the Career Brand podcast, and facilitating presentations and workshops for academic and other professional audiences, there is one element that has maintained a steady heartbeat in terms of my brand and business’s vital signs. And that’s my career brand, which I formulated and started to apply a couple of years ago.
Sure, I may continue to tweak the bylines and corresponding service offerings, but my core branding is Career Brand Consultant. This not only helps me maintain clarity and consistency as I continue to extend myself professionally, but also informs and inspires my corresponding promotions and interactions.
Inner and outer recognition
In the often-replicated, Bible-affiliated line spoken by Kevin Costner’s character in the late 1980s movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come,” the core message was that effort and belief will deliver positive outcomes. That what you reflect from within to without will become your reality. The establishment of a well-defined career brand aligns with this analogy.
In addition to spurring self-confident strides forward, it will escalate brand reach and engagement. The more you speak about and exemplify a career brand that you feel proud and loud about, the higher and wider you’ll go in terms of achieving professional targets and aspirations. In particular, the more target audiences will become convinced that your brand and business are the real deal.
Some of the core benefits of developing and demonstrating a right-fit career brand include:
Stronger self-recognition and self-belief in what you have to offer
Clarification of what brand promotional content should align with
Deeper resonance and relatability among primary target audiences
Foundational drivers that will continue to extend your brand reach
It’s also digitally attuned
On average, we have around 5 to 7 seconds to translate scan readers into longer-term viewers. Then there are the digital algorithms we need to accommodate if we want to ensure we’re discovered in online searches. That’s another benefit of establishing a clear, consistent, and constant career brand, in that it minimises the likelihood of confusion and delusion, not to mention disillusion, that can arise from unclear or mismatched business and brand content.
Not only will human readers quickly ascertain who you are and what you have to offer, but digital detectors and transmitters will also know how to connect and interact with your content.
Bricks-and-mortar approach to building long-term relevance
No matter the type of business, it’s a bricks-and-mortar, build-up approach that ensures you remain relevant and viable, one where career branding is used as the underpinning. A value-add lesson for me in 2025 has come via the regularly sold-out professional networking group that I’ve co-founded and co-hosted in my hometown of Melbourne.
It has reinforced that it’s essential to lay strong foundations of business or brand values, purpose, and principles before you start promoting, progressing, and evolving. Not only to keep you focused and self-assured, but also to convey that you know what you stand for, and that your efforts will remain meaningful and impactful.
Read more from Jeanette Walton
Jeanette Walton, Career Brand Consultant
Jeanette is a Career Brand Consultant who helps professionals worldwide to enhance their career prospects. To address a gap in the market, she designed a career branding framework that helps professionals design and apply their own unique career brand. She also avidly writes articles, newsletters and eBooks, features on podcasts, partners with industry alliances, and delivers educational presentations on the benefits of career branding. In her spare time, Jeanette fosters dogs, visits an aged care resident, and co-facilitates a LinkedIn Local networking group.
