Training Today: Better Brand of Trainer

If your approach to your career as a trainer could be summed up in one word, would it be passive? Most successful people manage their careers as closely as they manage all of the other important things in their lives, says Susan Hodgkinson, personal leadership and brand management expert and author of "The Leader's Edge: Using Personal Branding to Drive Performance and Profit."

Your go-getter counterparts, she says, routinely check up on their professional lives, and they perform routine maintenance to keep things running smoothly, taking an active role in charting their career progress to ensure they achieve their short-and long-term goals.

Issues Hodgkinson addresses in her book include:

- How to stay employable even when your company is handing out pink slips.

- How to push past being overlooked for your work.

- How to avoid getting a brand of "angry."

- How to get in front of your reputation and manage it.

- How to make sure what you do impacts your business' bottom line.

- How to meaningfully add to your skills set so you don't become an obsolete employee.

"Remember, we all already own a personal brand, and it controls our destiny," Hodgkinson says. "We can choose to manage the brand or we can let it manage us. We have no one to thank or blame but ourselves."