How do you create your professional differentiator?

Have you ever wondered how professionals differentiate themselves for career growth? Products can differentiate themselves with good online reviews for superior branding and price points. Can the same be done for professionals?

The short answer is no until now; however, it is possible with the new getCREDIBLE platform. getCREDIBLE platform is designed to capture reviews for professionals that are designed from the ground up for the characteristics of professionals.

How are professional reviews different from product reviews?

A professional's skills are analogous to a product's features. However, there is one big difference. A product's features are expected to be static over the product's life, whereas a professional's skill is expected to improve periodically with experience. 

For example, a High-definition TV with 4K picture quality is expected to have the same 4K picture quality for the life of the TV. However, an accounting professional with skills in Excel is expected to get better with experience by learning more features in Excel or by learning new financial skills. If you have it all on your resume, learn how to make your resume stand apart from the rest. 

Humans are expected to constantly improve with experience, so an experienced professional is paid more than a fresher. While learning on the job is a positive attribute for professionals, performance levels can drop due to external factors like stress, emotions, ego, health issues, etc. 

It is safe to state that a professional's performance will vary based on several factors; hence, a one-time snapshot will not give the complete picture of their performance. For example, one professional may have performed at the peak level for January while performing poorly for the next six months. 

The second professional may have performed at high levels for six months. The second professional is much more valuable to an employer in this scenario.getCREDIBLE platform is designed from the ground up to handle professional reviews, enabling professionals to take advantage of it for career growth. Let's see how it works.

How does the getCREDIBLE platform work?

getCREDIBLE platform is designed to understand the conversational text of professionals. Conversational text is a natural way in which humans express their opinions. However, adopting computers and software changed it to a structured format using forms, tables, rows, etc. 

With the emergence of new technologies like conversational AI and ML, it has become possible to understand conversation text, which is one of the foundational principles of getCREDIBLE.

While conversational text is a natural way for humans to interact, humans tend to be biased and emotional, which is not good when providing accurate feedback to other professionals. The getCREDIBLE platform adopts these five principles to get proper feedback. 

1. Anonymous – Keep all feedback anonymous and confidential to remove human bias
2. Involve all stakeholders – Involve all stakeholders, not just the favourable ones, to get a holistic and complete picture.
3. Unsolicited – All feedback is received unsolicited to avoid bias and to provide an opportunity to campaign for good feedback.
4. Continuous – Feedback will be received continuously to identify if the professional is a consistent performer or is subject to emotional ups and downs.
5. Open format – Finally, the available format is a conversational text discussed earlier.

While these features may sound complex, the platform does all that for you behind the scenes, and as a user, you have to follow the three simple steps to create your differentiator. These are explained in the next section.

Steps to create your differentiator

Having covered the key features of the getCREDIBLE platform, let us discuss the steps you must follow to create your differentiator, which is very simple and should not take more than 15 minutes.

Identify your critical skills.

While the getCREDIBLE platform makes it easy for you to get feedback and ratings from your professional ecosystem, you have to do some research to identify the skills for which you want to get good feedback and ratings, eventually becoming a differentiator for you. 

For example, create a view of your medium-term and long-term career goals and the skills and differentiators to help you achieve them. If you aspire to become a software architect in 2 years, your medium-term goal could be to become proficient in design and solutions to become an architect eventually. You then must identify the skills needed to be an expert in design, solutions, and architecture.

Form your professional ecosystem and post your milestones.

This is a crucial step as they will provide feedback on your work. Choose your professional ecosystem wisely using the following guidelines

• They have good visibility into your daily tasks
• Will provide regular feedback to you
• Will give honest and trustworthy feedback

The next step is to post milestones. Milestones are descriptions of your accomplishments in the last 30 days. Include details critical to your job's success, as you will get feedback on these parameters. Some essential elements to include are: what have you accomplished? When have you completed it? How have you accomplished? What is your role and so on?

Identify and publish your differentiators.

After submitting your milestone, the platform ensures that it reaches all members of your stakeholders and that feedback is received. After receiving your feedback, the getCREDIBLE platform will compute ratings for your overall milestones and skills. This process happens automatically in the background; no involvement is needed from your side.

Your skills with top ratings are your differentiator to use for your career growth. You will have to highlight these skills in your digital profile. While some professionals may have high ratings on some skills, it is expected to have some skills where improvement is required. 

The good part is you now know your strengths and weaknesses. For the skills that need improvement, you need to put a plan to build your ratings for those skills.

Build your ratings

Once the skills that need improvement are identified, the next step is creating and applying a learning plan in your professional work. You can then start posting the milestones using these improved skills to show improved ratings on them. 

The critical thing to note is not to worry about the low ratings you get in the early stages. It is accepted that skilled expertise will be insufficient initially and get better with experience. Your feedback will give you good pointers on the areas to improve, and you should leverage that fully. 

The key is to show continuous improvement through an upward trending line in your getCREDIBLE and skills graph.

Create your digital profile.

Now that you have all the required data in the form of ratings for four essential skills. It is time to start creating your digital profile. The good part of a digital profile (Slate) is that it is primarily number-driven, giving yourself an objective rating of your skills. 

However, it is also essential to describe yourself and your future goals. You can provide that in the executive summary section of the digital profile. The following are the three steps you have to do to create your digital profile

1. Description of your career goals in the executive summary
2. Use only skills that are strong and relevant to your career goals. Filter out the rest
3. Your employment history is validated in the platform to increase your credibility

Once the above is done, the rest is procedural, such as adding professional history, educational details, and certifications. You are now ready with your differentiators for career growth.

6. Identify and share with your target market.

The last step is to increase your visibility to increase the odds of landing a good job. You can do that by the following

• Publish your digital profile
• Share your professional credibility ratings. 
• Generate an I am credible badge
• Share the URL on different channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, and others

Identify the potential companies and hiring managers and ensure your differentiators are visible to them through various social media channels.

Conclusion: Adopt a product mindset for faster growth.

To wrap up, I emphasize that adopting a product development mindset helps to accelerate career growth. For a successful product, there are three vital dimensions to focus on. They are provided in the following table with the equivalent for a professional

As you can see, there are a lot of similarities, and following the approach followed by the product will also help in faster career growth. getCREDIBLE platform bridges the missing gap that professionals need to build their differentiators. Build an ecosystem, a network that will help you drive professional growth seamlessly. 

Good luck!