There are tons of Gen-Y Career Advisors on the internet. There are probably more Career Experts on the internet than Social Media Experts (now imagine that).However, when it comes to people who have truly made a reputable career in Gen-Y career advice, two names stand out above the rest. One is the owner of the Personal Branding Blog and self-proclaimed Gen-Y Personal Branding Expert Dan Schawbel, and the other is the Founder of Brazen Careerist and prolific writer Penelope Trunk.

Just like Tim Ferriss and Gary Vaynerchuk, Dan Schawbel and Penelope Trunk have vastly different styles in giving out career advices. Dan Schawbel usually gives out very solid textbook advices about building your personal brand and carving out a good niche for yourself, while Penelope Trunk takes the unorthodox and controversial approaches to teach the Gen-Ys some lessons.

Because of that difference, I would like to explore the various styles and different advices Dan Schawbel and Penelope Trunk gives to Gen-Y on each topic.

Dan Schawbel vs Penelope Trunk - Writing Styles

Dan Schawbel: The Professor

When you look at Dan Schawbel’s blogposts, it is always very professional and well structured. You can tell that Dan Schawbel has been carefully crafting his personal brand.

However, the downside to it is that sometimes it can get a bit dull and dry.

Dan rarely writes about his personal life and experiences. The only things that he reveals when he talks about himself are his list of accomplishments. When you hear “My name is Dan Schawbel”, be prepared to listen to another dozen seconds of all the impressive things he has accomplished. That is personal branding at its finest.

Penelope Trunk: The Gossipy Friend

On the other hand, Penelope Trunk takes things to another extreme. She takes her blog to such intensive personal levels that it shocks her audience.

Penelope Trunk would include details about who she hates, her sex and dating life, her headaches with balancing kids and company, and much more.

Unlike Dan Schwabel who focuses on pure advices, Penelope Trunk talks about her struggles and what people should learn from them. She allows people to see the raw things in life – with a Penelope twist. A lot of her posts are actually 90% personal experience, and 10% real career advice.

For instance, her post about How to Deal with Getting Fired (From Yahoo) focuses mostly on how it happened and how she felt at the moment, but only a small part of it is real advice on what SHOULD a person do in that situation. There are other posts about “How To” do something where she mostly talks about how she tries something and it made her extremely frustrated. Sometimes it’s a “How Not-To”.

In this sense, Dan Shawbel is like a professor that lectures about the fundamentals of a subject, which is very useful but not as interesting, whereas Penelope Trunk is like that best friend who is always sharing about her struggles and feelings while giving you advice based on them.

She even tells you how she changed her name from Adrienne Roston to Penelope Trunk.Your professor probably wouldn’t do that.

Dan Schawbel vs Penelope Trunk - Career Advices

With such different backgrounds and styles, lets check out what Dan Schawbel and Penelope Trunk have to say about various topics in career development.

Chances are, a lot of their advices will be radically different. However, you know that if they both say the same thing on the same topic, it definitely is something that you should be paying attention to.

Dan Schawbel vs Penelope Trunk on Grad School

Lets start with a topic that is easy to digest: should you go to grad school or not.

Being a very text-book person as he is, Dan Schawbel says that it’s very situational. Here he lists out what he thinks are the pros and cons of going to grad school. On his list one of the “cons” of going to grad school include “If you don’t have an MBA or similar degree, you suffer a competitive disadvantage and can’t rise to the top of the corporate ladder because other’s have one.”

From that you can see that Dan Schawbel definitely points his career advices towards being competitive in the corporate world. It seems like according to Dan Schawbel, if you can afford being in an Ivy League school in a recession and you don’t have a high paying job that you love, then it’s a good idea.

On the other hand, Penelope Trunk’s entrepreneur and columnist background say that grad school should only happen if you are ABSOLUTELY sure why you want it. Besides saying that graduate school is outdated, she states that advanced degrees in the Humanities are worthless, MBAs are only useful if you get in early, and that it is “not a way to play it safe, but it’s a way to play the odds”

Dan Schawbel vs Penelope Trunk on Self-Promotion and Personal Branding

Ok, lets get into Dan Schawbel’s strong forte. As a person concerned about his/her career development, a personal brand is essential to becoming successful. And along with personal branding comes self promotion.

Regarding self-promotion, Penelope Trunk chooses to do it in a very subtle manner. You rarely see her everywhere telling people to go on her blog and Brazen Careerist. You also don’t always see her talking about her professional background. In fact, in a post about 5 ways to be better at self promotion she talks about specializing, tacking difficult issues, shutting up, and staying patient. These are all very passive manners of self-promotion.

Penelope Trunk definitely tries to promote herself by being VERY different. Instead of telling people why they should care about her stuff, she creates content that is so radical that people have no choice but to care about it.

Dan Schwabel, on the other hand, is the master of active self-promotion. To his credit and tons of hard work, he is all over the internet in a relatively short amount of time.

As a strategy, he would make sure that people recognize his credentials as early as possible, and he would be wherever his audiences are at. That way he makes sure he offers value for as much people as possible.

Some people frown upon active self-promotion, but Dan Schawbel says it well when he says that An Ego in an Opportunity. He talks about how we need to utilize our egos into power that pushes us forward instead of treating it like something that should be beaten down and locked up. Dan Schawbel definitely walks his talk.

More importantly, Dan gives out much more specific advice on exactly how to execute with the self-promotion process and build one’s personal brand. Here he creates an intensive personal marketing plan that any beginner can follow in a step-by-step manner. This is definitely more helpful to those who want to execute a self-promotion plan compared to just some general tips and advice.

Dan Schawbel vs Penelope Trunk on Advice for Undergraduates

College only happens once (hopefully), and you only have one chance to do it right. Both Penelope Trunk and Dan Schwabel focus some of their attention to helping out kids who are still in school.

In Penelope Trunk’s article about What to do in college to be successful in your career, she lays out 20 practical tips about how to make sure your schooling doesn’t get in the way of your education.

Dan Schawbel also wrote a post about the things he would do differently if he were in college again. Dan focuses his advice heavily on building relationships and networking, since he was over-achieving on everything else (he also kindly gave a self-promotion alert on this post).

You will notice that both Dan Schawbel and Penelope Trunk talk about getting more involved in campus and engage with more opportunities so you can learn as much as possible.Neither one of them emphasized on going to class more often or getting a 4.0.

As you can see, being an undergrad is about being active, learning, connecting with like-minded people, and discovering your own passions, not making a piece of paper look good.

Dan Schawbel vs Penelope Trunk on The Corporate Ladder

The corporate world is a huge part of America. There’s a reason why it’s called Corporate America. And to fulfill the “American Dream”, one must supposedly be part of that corporate ladder.

Dan Schawbel enjoys talking about building a strong brand name to strive in the corporate world and climb the corporate ladder effectively. He specifically writes a post about Climbing the Corporate Ladder and building up years of experience with leadership development programs.

On the other hand, Penelope Trunk writes a post about how The Ladder isn’t the only way up, specifying that people can start businesses, work in a startup, or do some freelance work instead. She also says that instead of serving in the corporate world for decades, one should recognize that paying dues now becomes old-school.

The key here is to really know what your life goals are. If you want to strive in the corporate world and become a high level executive, you need to play the corporate ladder game.

If your goal is to create enough freedom to do what you are passionate about, you don’t need to climb the ladder. The rollercoast is better for you instead.

Dan Schawbel vs Penelope Trunk on Networking

We all know that networking, genuinely known as building relationships, is essential in being successful in whatever you do. After all, every single dollar you make is given to you by someone else, and if have zero people skills, there will be very few people giving you those dollars.

Unsurprisingly, both Dan Schawbel and Penelope Trunk emphasize on the importance of networking. Penelope Trunk talks about how the key to make people like you is to be responsible, know what you can offer, and put in some flattery.

In 5 Tips for networking with people who are more successful than you are, Dan Schwabel also emphasizes on having something to offer and give it out for free. He also talks about genuine interest and techniques of being discovered by them.

Clearly, strong networking is about appealing to others’ interests and helping them out. Things can only grow as deals happen, and deals flow smoothly when it’s through relationships.

Dan Schawbel vs Penelope Trunk on Money and Happiness

Money and happiness are things we all care about from a career aspect. Both Dan Schawbel and Penelope Trunk have something to say about that, but offer different advices.

Interestingly, Dan Schawbel who is more of the corporate routed guy, promotes leaving a job that you don’t dig and doing what you are passionate about. He also reminds people that happiness is internal and cannot be satisfied by materialistic standards.

Penelope Trunk, who is an entrepreneur, decides to tell people that the connection between a good job and happiness is overrated, and that doing what you love is bad advice. She feels that doing what you are good at is far more practical than doing what you love, which makes a lot of sense. If you do what you are good at and become successful at it, you set up your life to become happy in an easier manner.

Like Dan, Penelope Trunk also agrees that one does not need to be making a lot of money to be happy and adds that a person’s sex life matters more.

Dan Schawbel vs Penelope Trunk on Dating and Love Life

Dating and love life is something that affects our careers and choices significantly. Penelope Trunk, unsurprisingly, has a lot to say about relationships and dating, but Dan Schawbel also has some insight into how to maintain good relationships and develop personal brands with your significant other.

Using Personal Branding as a focus, Dan Schawbel talks about how to build your personal brand while being in a relationship. After all, a significant other is one of those “projects” that refuse to be balanced off with another.

On the other hand, Dan also talks about how to co-brand yourself with your significant other. That way you share your personal brands and don’t really need to be stuck between a relationship and developing a personal brand.

When you talk about dating and relationship advice and topics from Penelope Trunk, whoof, that’s all over the place. Penelope Trunks goes into intensive detail about her marriage, her dating life and much more. We also learn from her that high income women get more oral sex, and that if you are having sex with a woman who wrote about oral sex you are quite obliged to do it.

She also explores the curious topic of whether woman can use their power at work to help their young lovers like men do to younger girls. Finally, she gives out standard nice advice about how can girls get guys at work by having verbal cues and playing hard to get.

For Dan Schawbel, love life and dating still needs to have some aspect of being professional and brand building. Whereas for Penelope Trunk, love is a crazy thing and it goes all over the place. We might as well go crazy with it.

Dan Schawbel vs Penelope Trunk: Who would you learn from more?

In a video interview we did with Dan Schawbel, Dan humbly says that Penelope is definitely the top person he knows in the field.

However, Dan has definitely carved out his niche and has a lot of potential ahead of him. He also has many more decades to push out and strengthen his personal brand since Penelope Trunk has been in the field for longer.

What about you? Do you feel like you learn more from Dan Schawbel or Penelope Trunk? What would you like to see more of?