Hey, everybody, and welcome to the 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 website, whether it's a blog, Worchester, resume 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 the scale.

You can take it back and have it be a blog where you have to Turrill 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 website with your own name.

You know, in my case, it's Brand Dennis, be Brandon, Dennis dot com.

Now, I don't believe I have 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 domains

seem 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 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 going to 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 website as it sits right now.

It 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 our LinkedIn profile.

So this is the back end of 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 links don't quite fit anywhere else on the page.

Do you kind of just throw them there, 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 it and this

isn't some new area for you, then fill it up with anything you can.

The you want this you don't want this to be empty.

But if you're already in it, let's say you've been in it for the last four or five years and maybe

you worked a few odd jobs beforehand.

What I would recommend is leaving off those jobs that are not strictly it based.

Now, there's times where you might modify your resume to point towards or be more relevant towards

it, 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 it or information security,

then you're going to want to label that in appropriate 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, you know, 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 asked you, you'd be like, yeah, I was working part time, full

time at X, Y and Z, 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, whatever 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 certifications.

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.

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.

So these are some important projects that you that you felt were important enough to actually put on

your resume 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 them, you type it in, you add them, and then people will eventually

over time when they view your profile, they'll click and say, I endorse this person for security depends.

Networking, firewalls, whatever the case might be, you'll they'll start endorsing you on it.

And it's just a matter of time where 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 tucked 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 up here to 378 searches just this week alone and 277 people need 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 that I want to provide you is once you've built out your profile, that's

an old picture.

I get updated.

And keep it updated profile picture so we want to 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 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.

And this is telling LinkedIn 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 really end up in the air type of description.

But it really just depends on the recruiter.

But I would always recommend going through 60 year defensive security.

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 and attackers build tooling, perform

scope and open ended internal interfacing engagements.

That's fine.

Cool.

Perform internal assessments, tailored reconnaissance, weaponization exploits, lateral movement,

all standard stuff, scripting and coding.

Facebook has begun scripting and coding knowledge of Linux, Windows, Mac OS, Windows Tech Services

on Enterprise.

So it's pretty.

This is a pretty standard defensive 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 emails

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 GoDaddy below an affiliate

link there, and you can grab out and build your own hosted Web platform through GoDaddy.

They can get you the domain and everything else like that.

That's what I've done for plenty of mine.

So I recommend it.

I've done it.

I use it.

I currently use it.

So build 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 individual's website 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 can get it for like the 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 free, you don't have to get the pre premium version.

So at least get the LinkedIn process done.

That's going to save your -- more than you know.