BY KAMYA MARWAH
Letting people see what you are learning and building can create real career capital.
When I first started posting on LinkedIn, my goal was pretty simple: I wanted to get hired.
I’d already been rejected from more than 700 job applications, so I knew the traditional route wasn’t exactly working for me. I started posting consistently because I wanted employers to see what they were getting before they even sat across from me in an interview. It worked.
Since graduating from university two years ago, I’ve received three full-time job offers—two of which I took: first as a marketing executive at a jewellery brand, and later as a marketing and community manager at a B2B startup, where I now lead growth. The third came from an agency helping students land jobs in the UK.
The interesting part wasn’t just that these opportunities came through LinkedIn. It was that I didn’t have to convince these employers to get to know me from scratch. They had already found me through my content—they knew what I did, what I cared about and how I thought.
In my most recent role, I was initially hired partly because the team wanted me to replicate what I’d built on LinkedIn for the company and its brand. The plans eventually changed, but my personal brand was a big part of why I was brought in.
That experience changed how I think about a CV.
A CV tells someone what you’ve done. Your content can show them how you think.
My LinkedIn presence has become a living portfolio. People can see what I think about marketing, the projects I’m working on, the side hustles I’m building, the things I’m learning and, occasionally, what I’m having for dinner. They get a sense of my personality—something a CV was never designed to capture.
It also changes who controls the first step of the career conversation.
The traditional job search is outbound: find an opportunity, apply, wait and try to convince someone you’re worth interviewing. Building in public creates another possibility: you build a body of work, people discover it, and opportunities can start coming to you.
That’s happened repeatedly in my own career. One of the opportunities I still find hard to believe is becoming a columnist for Inc. I never imagined that consistently posting on LinkedIn would eventually lead to writing for a publication I’d admired for years.
But perhaps the biggest misconception around personal branding is that it means becoming an influencer. I’ve built a community of more than 30,000 people while working full-time jobs. I wasn’t trying to become a full-time creator—I was documenting what I was already doing, learning and thinking about.
That’s the thing about creating content: you are the niche.
A coffee chat. An advertisement you noticed. An article you read. A customer conversation. A mistake at work. A side project you’re building. There is no shortage of things to talk about when you’re paying attention to your own life.
Over time, those observations become a body of work that shows people what you’re interested in, what you know and how you see the world.
That’s where personal branding becomes career capital.
We’re used to thinking about career capital as qualifications, experience, job titles and connections. But visibility can compound too–every post becomes another piece of proof, every conversation adds another relationship, and your audience becomes a network that exists beyond your current employer.
Your career doesn’t have to start and end with the organizations on your CV. You can build something that belongs to you.
For me, that something has become a community. I’ve made friendships through LinkedIn, found people who have supported me through major life changes and built relationships with people I’ve never met in person.
If someone offered me enough money to stop posting, I’d probably need a few million dollars to consider it—not because of the follower count, but because I’d be giving up the community I’ve built alongside.
That’s the part of personal branding that gets lost when we reduce it to followers, impressions and “influence.” The real asset isn’t attention. It’s trust.
And you don’t need 30,000 followers to build it. You don’t need to post every day or call yourself a creator. You just need to let people see what you’re already thinking, learning and doing. Being good at your job is only one part of building a career. The other is making it possible for the right people to know what you’re good at.
Feature image credit: Getty Images