It has all the earmarks of a buzzword or business jargon, but call it what you want, career experts in all walks of life say personal branding is vital to today’s career success. So in case you don’t know what it is, I’ll tell you.

Personal branding is all about marketing yourself or creating yourself as a “brand.” What do you stand for? What sets you apart from your competition? What are your unique attributes? How do you represent yourself online and offline?

Here’s another way I like to think of it: If you could give yourself a tagline or slogan, what would it be? Think of it as a witty extension of your job title. I like to say I’m a “higher education writer and blogger extraordinaire,” for instance. An editor friend of mine gets even more creative, calling herself the “content pimp” (although not on formal letterhead, or anything, but you get the idea).

I recently interviewed Frank Schoeneman, CEO of Empire Beauty Schools, the largest provider of cosmetology education in the country, for our sister blog, A Minute With SpaBeautySchools (check it out for some of his great beauty industry tips and quips next week), and he was touting the importance of personal branding.

“You are your own brand. What makes you so special? There are a lot of those people out there who are very good at what they do — that have better skills than you do — but there’s nobody better at being you, than you. If you’re able to develop the people skills to know your product, to know your services, to figure out how and when to apply them to the right customer, your branding has been set.”

Now remember, this is a professional in the beauty industry. Yet in our conversation, we didn’t talk hot hair colors and cosmetology trends — we discussed his mission to help students market themselves. And I think that’s true of all fields these days, which is why more and more colleges and career schools are catching on and teaching this concept to their students. Right now, though, you’ll mainly hear about personal branding offerings in the form of seminars or one-day workshops. But mark my words — you may start hearing about schools offering it as a full-fledged elective course in the near future.

Personal branding guru, Dan Schawbel, has been campaigning this idea for quite some time. He blogs:

“You need to reach across boundaries, in a world where everyone is on the same plane, and you can almost touch hiring managers at companies you want to work for. Don’t send out a 10,000 resume blast because that is just like the 10,000 emails reporters get everyday and they are discounted as spam. The real way to succeed in college is to understand how the internet can be used to get a job or start a business, and then act.”

So how do you want to brand yourself? Think about it, and start doing it ASAP. It can make all the difference, especially in a tight economy.

Just for fun, what would you like your tagline to be?