A Guide To Change For Everybody: Growing Your Network
This chapter is from the book “Next For Me: A Guide to Change for Everybody” from the founders of Next For Me.
You’re serious about your next career change — it’s time to switch your networking into hyperdrive.
Establish your domain expertise by getting to know important players working in your area of focus. Engage with them via LinkedIn, social media or email. If they pass a gut-check, invite them into your confidence and you’ll see how these adjacent people and companies can become valuable connections in your network.
We’re not suggesting you become that annoying person on LinkedIn who wants to “have a quick call to ‘pick your brain’.” Relationships take time, and will be doomed if you’re constantly asking the other person what they can do for you.
As our advisor Karen Wickre notes in her book Taking the Work Out of Networking,
“… avoid thinking of each encounter as a transaction. If you treat your connections as a kind of personal ATM you use for frequent withdrawals, you’ll quickly be disappointed (and overdrawn).”
Career Coach John Tarnoff takes a slightly different point of view in his book Boomer Reinvention. He writes:
“Networking is not about taking. It’s about giving. And your job is to figure out how you can first give to the people in your network, whether it is putting people together, connecting people to one another, whether it’s supplying interesting information about your field.”
Read: Knowing What You Stand For
Do the exercise: Identifying Your Core Values
This chapter is from the book “Next For Me: A Guide to Change for Everybody” from the founders of Next For Me.
