Everybody welcome to next video.
So we've previously talked about personal branding.
Now I want to take that into a little bit more depth.
Personal branding is a very important way for you as a professional in any industry regardless of its
security I.T. nursing medical.
It doesn't matter.
Personal branding is investing in yourself so that way when somebody goes ahead and looks at you as
an individual from a professional standpoint or even not professional they understand where you sit
your skill set and what you can bring to the table.
Now there's a few things that I recommend to start building your professional brand.
One is get yourself a Web site whether it's a blog with just a resumé on it.
There's thousands of examples online about that.
Whether you create a blog of your own to share information such as teaching somebody something or whatever
the case might be it doesn't have to be something like Red Team nation as an example.
This is more of an organizer or a company that I have built which is part of my personal brand.
However it doesn't have to be to this scale.
You can take it back and have it be a blog where you have tutorial links on things like that and I have
one of those as well where you teach people different skill sets in smaller chunks.
Like I said we can start what I would recommend starting with is the resume.
On your Web site with your own name you know in my case it's Brandon Dennis or Brandon Dennis dot com.
Now I don't believe I have that I own that domain but that's an example of what you could do.
And for you you might want to do that for for yourself and build that out because then it's very easy
to send somebody a link with your name on it.
So they now recognize your name as a domain which makes it easier for them to remember because domain
seemed to be easier for people to remember the names.
So having your name in a domain makes a little easier for them to remember you've got a graphical UI
for it so they can actually scroll through and look at it and look at different things and then you
have that side of the fence where it's your personal brand and then you have what I would recommend
doing is creating a LinkedIn profile.
What we're gonna do is go ahead and show you mine as an example and I want you by the end of this video
to go ahead and build out your own if you don't already have it or improve on it if you don't.
Now again this is just my Web site as it sits right now might be different by the time you actually
see it.
But this is part of my personal brand.
So if we go ahead and scoot over to are linked in profile so this is the back in my LinkedIn profile.
Ignore this I kind of have to format that a little better.
But as you can see here we.
Your title with your name is very important.
Some people throw certifications at the end.
I tend to be you know one certification whatever I'm most proud of I kind of stick it there first.
I won't put five or six or ten different ones a lot of people have very very long names in the title
that you work for area that you're in.
That's all pretty standard.
Makes you fill that out.
And I would recommend filling this part out as well.
Just to make sure that you've got something there.
Sometimes these type of things don't quite fit anywhere else on the page.
You kind of just thrown their then you have your experience.
So what you've been doing over the years you want to fill this up.
And if you're new to I.T. and this isn't some new area for you then fill it up with anything you can.
You want this to you don't want this to be empty but if you're already an I.T. let's say you've been
I.T. for the last four or five years and maybe you worked a few odd jobs beforehand.
What I would recommend is leading off those jobs that are not strictly I.T. based.
Now there's times where you might modify your resumé to point towards or be more relevant towards I.T.
if that's what you're aiming for towards medical if that's what you're aiming for.
You have versions of your resume.
But in this case if your LinkedIn profile is your professional brand is I.T. or our information security
then you're going to want to label that inappropriate way.
So in my case I've removed everything from my previous job such as working at Five Guys restaurants
and stuff like that that doesn't make any relevance to what I'm doing in my career.
And it's important to kind of get that out of the way you want to be as thorough and hear what you did
what projects you worked on.
Any promotions you've had.
Go ahead and add everything in here as much as you can fill it up with as much information as you can
as long as it is relevant to what you're trying to do is your end goal.
And if it's if you don't have enough of that.
Fill it in with everything else they'd rather see some more stuff from jobs that don't quite make sense
to what you're aiming to do but you still want it there to show work history so it doesn't look like
you have a gap missing for five or six years or three years or two years before you got into the industry.
But once you have a few years in the industry experience it doesn't matter what you were doing before
that.
Any odd jobs that they if they ask you you'd be like Yeah I was working part time full time at x y easy
but you don't necessarily need it front facing.
So once you're done with this you have your education so you can go from high school all the way up
to your masters or doctorates wherever you want you could just pop in there when you graduated when
you were there try to fill that out as long as it's relevant to you.
If you just had the high school diploma you can leave that in there completely optional.
I'm probably going to remove the high school diploma part at some point because it's more it's less
relevant than the rest of the degrees.
Following this you have your certification.
So any certifications you have here plop them in there.
I would recommend putting them in there.
Only once you've completed them not any that are currently in progress following this any volunteer
experience.
That's fine.
Go ahead and do that and then we have accomplishments.
So for courses if you took a lot of courses in school that were cybersecurity related because that's
kind of where I'm focusing at.
Yeah.
You would dump them in here just any other course you could put side courses that you took online in
here as well.
And then we have some projects.
These are some important projects that you that you felt were important enough to actually put on your
resumé something that was a big project and you fill that up as you go.
This is a career building side of things.
And then if you have any publications you can just dump them in there and put in your publications as
you want and that's good to go.
There is one extra bit is the skills and endorsements.
Now endorsements you're just going to have to come from people.
There's no other way around it.
But what you want to do is add your add your skills.
So when you go in here you add you type it in.
You add them and then people will eventually over time when they do your profile they'll click and say
I endorse this person for security VPN networking firewalls whatever the case might be.
You'll they'll start endorsing you on it.
And it's just a matter of time you just build it up over time.
And sometimes it's relevant sometimes it's not depends on the recruiter.
But in most cases I haven't found it very useful.
I just popped it in there so I can complete the profile and the more thorough your profile is the more
you're going to be viewed.
So as you can see in here I've put up here to three hundred and seventy eight searches just this week
alone.
And two hundred seventy seven people viewed my profile just this week.
So this this is when you start building up the profiles you'll start seeing it.
It happened a little bit better and the more people that view it the more options of jobs you have.
But one tidbit of information I want to provide you is once you've built out your profile that's an
old picture.
I get update that
keep an updated profile picture.
So what you wanna do is it'll go through a quick tutorial when you first create the account.
Try to fill out as much as you can.
Anything that's relevant that you can fill out fill it out.
You want this to be as full as possible but one bit of information that I want you to know is when you
create your profile it's going to ask you for suggestions on what your interests are such as down here
as an example.
You want to build your interest out on what you're actually interested in and then you are going to
tell it what type of positions you're looking for and when.
What's important about that is then you're going to start showing up to recruiters once you hit this
jobs button.
So if we go over here and we do let's do offensive security.
Right.
So we're looking for offensive security engineer positions so we can see here there's Teradata Amazon
Facebook has a few data dog again Amazon Splunk.
So you can see once you start looking at these and you start clicking on the profile you start reviewing
them.
You start looking.
What this is doing is this is telling me that you're looking for a job and then you're going to start
getting a lot of messages.
Once you start building up that profile people sometimes recruiters look at your profile sometimes they
don't.
It's really an up in the air type of description but it really just depends on the recruiter.
But I would always recommend going through 60 here offenses of purity.
We've got our responsibilities minimum qualifications any publicly released its full time employment
so you can see they're looking for document and model infrastructure attackers build tooling perform
scope and open ended internal much facing engagements.
That's fine.
Cool.
Perform internal assessments tailored reconnaissance weaponization exploit lateral movement all standard
stuff scripting and coding.
Facebook has begun scripting and coding knowledge of Linux Windows Mac OS X Windows tech services on
enterprises.
So it's pretty.
This is a pretty standard offensive security our red team position and when you start looking at it
again it's going to you're going to start showing up as a potential for recruiters when they do their
searches and that's when you're going to start getting the e-mails back.
So take take a moment build yourself out with your professional email that you've already built.
Build out your own LinkedIn profile at a bare minimum because it's going to be I find that most of the
jobs that I have gotten over the years has came from LinkedIn.
I don't think I've really gotten a job offer from anywhere that I didn't find over LinkedIn.
So it's a very powerful network and it's very important to build up those connections as you go.
And if you really want to take that extra step go to I've got a link to go Daddy below an affiliate
link there and you can grab out and build your own hosted Web platform to go daddy.
They can get you the domain and everything else like that.
That's what I've done for plenty of mine so I recommended I've done it.
I use it.
I currently use it.
So builds build it up build your WordPress get a hosted platform you don't need anything special and
then make sure you get an SSL certificate because there's nothing worse than going to a security blog
or a security individuals Web site and then not seeing a certificate.
So make sure you go ahead and get that done and it's definitely worth your time I think you get it for
like certificates like 60 bucks 70 bucks a year and the hosting you can get for like sixteen dollars
so it's definitely something I would recommend doing if you have the time to do it.
If not LinkedIn is for you you don't have to get the primo premium version.
So at least get the LinkedIn process done that's going to save your ass more than you know.