Your personal brand relies on effectively communicating your unique skills, experience, and values when it comes to your professional life. Being able to quickly explain your job or career is essential for networking events and other similar situations, but what if your job is too complicated to squeeze into an elevator pitch? 
A recent post on Career Rocketeer highlighted this phenomena, which many professionals experience but few know how to handle when it comes to crafting their personal brand. From the time we’re young, we’re “trained” to hear cookie-cutter job titles like teacher, physical therapist, accountant — it’s a system that allows us to quickly categorize our professions, but it’s also super unrealistic. After all, many of today’s workers have multiple aspects to their personal brand.
For instance, some workers have a 9-to-5 job but also do creative work on the side. And increasingly in today’s corporate world, job titles are becoming a mesh of words that don’t particularly make sense. Titles like service coordinator, principal consultant, and marketing product administrator can make it hard to discern exactly what it is an employee does.
Complicated titles can be hard to explain in an elevator pitch, and it can hurt people’s perception of your personal brand. So what do you do if your job title creates confusion when you try to explain it to others? How do you explain quickly and succinctly, without boring anyone to sleep? Career Rocketeer offers a few suggestions for the professional with the not-so-clear job title:
Focus on verbs. This means identifying action words that explain what you do. For a principal consultant, this may mean you analyze client needs, propose corrective actions, execute and monitor these actions, and provide guidance and advice. Consider both your daily tasks and your overall strategies to determine the best way to explain what it is you do. Focus on selecting the most important actions you take in your job to clearly demonstrate your tasks and skills.
Communicate your goals. Next, determine what the goals of your individual actions are. For Career Rocketeer’s principal consultant example, they recommend stating goals such as improving employee satisfaction with the business, improving management results, inspiring managers and employees to increase output and profitability, or making the office a great place to work. Including goals in your elevator pitch can give a networking contact a better grasp of your personal brand and the specific outcomes of the work you do every day.
This strategy can work for any professional with an unclear job title. Not only will you be providing a concrete definition of what you do for your elevator pitch, but also you’ll be able to give more insight into your work than a simple job title can communicate.
Have you ever had to deal with a difficult job title? How did you craft your elevator pitch? Share your tips in a comment below.
