SoFi Blog

Last month, we hosted a SoFi member event in Los Angeles with special guest Johanna Maska, who shared details of her impressive career, including serving as Director of Press Advance for the Obama administration and Vice President of Marketing for the Los Angeles Times.

As someone who knows more than just a few things about transitioning big, Ms. Maska was the perfect guest speaker for our members, whose career paths are anything but traditional. Familiar with good and bad twists and turns, and some really wild rides, our members were wholly tuned in as she told her stories.

Personal branding—the practice of educating key decision-makers about your unique value—is more important now than ever. Yet, getting a good grasp of the techniques used to build a personal brand can be tricky. How is a personal brand best created? How does one begin to understand its principles? And where should the line between branding and self-promotion be drawn? We’ve got answers.

Most companies today wouldn’t think of operating without a thoughtfully crafted mission statement. But when it comes to running our own careers, too many of us skip this crucial step.

A mission statement is a declaration of the organization’s core purpose, usually encompassing what the business does, how it does it and who it does it for. It’s brief, focused, and serves as a guiding principle for the company’s employees.

For example, Amazon’s mission statement is: “To be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” Sounds about right, doesn’t it?

Launching a startup always feels somewhat risky. Launching a startup when you have student loan debt to pay? That can feel downright dangerous.

Elena Lucas knows the feeling well. Despite owing what she calls “Monopoly money” worth of college and graduate school debt, Lucas turned down a secure position with a large solar company to co-found UtilityAPI, a renewable energy software company. “It was a leap of faith,” she remembers, “but I had to give it a go.”

For young professionals today, there’s been a “good news, bad news” financial scenario developing for a while now.

Good news first: The unemployment rate for college grads, ages 22-27, is finally on the decline. Recent data from the New York Fed outlines a 7.1 percent unemployment rate in March 2011 and a 4.9 percent in 2015.

The bad news? Despite the fact that there are more jobs available for younger workers, widespread wage stagnation and decline has made it hard for 20- and 30-somethings to play financial catch up. Add to that a record volume of student loan debt, and you’ve got an entire generation suffering from a generational “wealth gap.”