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After several years of expansion and recruitment, large parts of the public sector are now going through a period of restructuring, with many people being made redundant. In part this was planned; reshuffling the organisational structure of public sector bodies is nothing new, but this time the scale and speed of the restrucutre has been profoundly affected by the recession. And of course, as with all organisational change, the biggest impact will be on the people who work there.

Learning to live with workplace change has become a hot topic in recent years. From a career perspective the most important issue is how a restructure will impact on the consistency and integrity of your CV; in other words will the job you are given as a result of the restructure enable you to be seen by colleagues and prospective employers as you were before? This question has led us at Career Energy to emphasise the importance of Personal Branding.

Personal Branding means understanding yourself in a market context. Who are you in your working persona, what are your unique strengths and personal qualities that make you the peson you are? Just as every successful product is packaged into a unique brand, which leads people to buy it, so every individual can present themselves in a unique way which emphasises their desirability, both at work and in their personal life.

The key to surviving a restructure is to be aware of and to work on your personal brand. To ensure that the role you move into is consistent with what you have done in the past and with where you want your career to go. Change can be unsettling, particularly when it is imposed from outside. Personal branding allows you to maintain your individuality in the face of external upheavals.

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Tags: Career Advice, Career Change, Career Energy, careers, Change, Change Management, Personal Branding, Public Sector, Redundancy, Restructuring

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 6:27 am and is filed under Career Advice, Career Change, Career Consultant, Career Energy, Career Planning, Personal Branding, Redundancy, Workplace Dilemmas . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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