Self-Reflection Journal

PART A; PRE-Course Reflection on My Personal Online Brand

Before taking the BUS3DIG course, my concept of branding was different. I never knew that one has to brand him or herself to get a job. We don’t always have to talk about our professional work experiences. Sometimes the employer also wants to know if our passion or how we socialize. The survey done by Career Builders told that 70 percent of hiring is done by checking the social media profiles of the candidate. This includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram et cetera (Castrillon, 2019).

This course made me realize the importance of self-reflection and how do we have to present ourselves online. I thought only businesses become a brand but this course taught me that brand is a name with a value, it could either be of a person, an organization, or a product. Moreover, I was a very active user of social media and it was a part of my life. So, I thoroughly enjoyed this course because it taught me how to utilize my time on social media in a productive manner.

Being a Saudi Arabian, I was always assumed to have been less hardworking or someone who is not ready to struggle. But I was never born with a silver spoon and I always wanted to put effort to explore the world and groom myself. But when I checked my social media accounts, they were not reflecting my passion to struggle. They were all about my traveling adventures or my time with friends. That was all leisure and just a fraction of my life and not me. Also, I am a finance student and initially, I studied in Canada and then moved to Melbourne for higher education. But in no way my social media accounts showed my craze for numbers. I have shifted from Canada to Australia just for the sake of my education and I want people to know that I am an ambitious person with career goals. Therefore, I carefully started filtering useless information (and must include all my academic and professional work information) from my profile and made sure all my information is not public. 

Part B; Reflection on my Personal Online Brand

I realize the importance of developing/maintaining my social media and be careful while sharing my views or posting anything as it tells about my point of view which would reflect me. Secondly, I never cared about what would google show if my name is being searched on its engine. But this course made me realize that I will have to make sure that there are positive things when I am being googled and not just something negating my personality or should not be up there. Even if something doesn’t show up when you search your name on Google, it means you haven’t worked well on your branding online (Heitzman, 2019). Therefore, you need to put something on the internet.