Dr. Neil Hair

I recently asked my graduate marketing concepts students to consider their unique selling proposition as part of a homework assignment. A number of them rightly struggled with this seemingly straight forward task. Ive suggested a number of ways of uncovering personal USP's (PUSPS) using personal construct theory. The idea is that you elicit through sets of comparisons against two other items (ie yourself, and two other people that you admire) the key issues that differentiate you from everyone else. Not an easy task. Not for the faint of heart. Several iterations of this 'triad sort' method should reveal a number of factors that you could then build into a statement about yourself for your resume. The trick though is not to ask yourself how you see your own differences, but to ask essentially a customer - or neutral party - to do it for you. Your findings are lightly to surprise you. I would argue that by going through this process you elicit genuinely unique attributes about your personality that you can then use to show off to the wider world. Lets face it - everyone likes to see themselves as reliable or trustworthy. Its hardly a unique trait. What you might find having gone through this process though is that you're also timely with your decision making - you defend co-workers decisions - you're fun to be around. The process itself is enlightening and from here you can build a statement about yourself that you see as a good reflection of who you are in the workforce. I'd encourage you to try it. I think its particularly important for those who are relatively new to the workforce to be able to present a clear synoposis of their character for would be employers who dont know you from Adam.