Personal branding

This Business English lesson is dedicated to the topic of personal branding and offers practical tips about building your personal brand. Students will discuss topics like professional image and reputation, social media presence, and the importance of managing your personal brand. Other video-based lessons that you might find interesting are: “Brand differentiation”, “Dealing with reputational damage and defamation“, “Dress for success“, “How to find your passion”, “Cancel culture”, “Phrasal verbs: social media“, “Idioms: image and reputation“, and “Phrasal verbs: role models“.

Speaking: The lesson starts with 4 photos of well-known people (Steve Jobs, Michelle Obama, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey). Students choose 2 or 3 of them and discuss different questions about them. Then, they are asked to define what personal branding is. After defining what personal branding is, students look at different expressions (e.g. professional reputation, career advancement, differentiation in a competitive job market, trust, and credibility) and discuss how each one is related to personal branding and the importance of personal branding. Students then look at some statistics related to recruitment and personal branding and answer a few questions.

Listening: Listening comprehension activities in this worksheet are designed around the ideas presented in the following video: “How to build a personal brand” by Overmatter. Students follow the link, watch the video on YouTube, and complete 3 Activities.

Vocabulary: Students work on vocabulary by matching the qualities to their opposites (e.g. integrity-dishonesty, adaptability-inflexibility, humility-arrogance).

Speaking: Students take a look at different questions that appear in the video and interview each other. They are encouraged to use the words from the previous activity.

Reading and writing: Students learn how to write their own mission statement. First, they take a look at 6 mission statements and decide which person each statement belongs to (e.g. a real estate agent, a tech entrepreneur, etc.). Then students choose 3 of the professionals and discuss which social media platform would be best for them to reach their target audience and what kind of content might their target audience find useful. After that students take a look at a few useful phrases from the mission statements. Finally, students are asked to write their own mission statements after reading a few tips.

You can use the conversation cards for additional speaking practice.