Networking – Art or Science?
By Julia Barber, Director of Graduate Recruitment
The Cornell Partnership
September 2006
Networking is not a dirty word. It is not shorthand for acquiring and manipulating acquaintances in a purely self-serving or self-promoting manner, using them and then tossing them aside. Nor is it some kind of mysterious activity that is purely the province of a gregarious minority – we all do it on a subconscious level every day.
After decades of insider schmoozing and working for daddy’s friends, we all realise that the cliché of “it’s not what you know…” is no longer enough to guarantee success. No matter how well connected you are, there are still statistics to be learnt, dissertations to be written and tutors and politicians to appease. Man cannot pass finals armed with an overflowing SIM card and little black book alone.
However, finals start to mean very little when you graduate unless you recognise the significance of knowing the people you know. Life as a student is multi-dimensional: you build relationships with the university, your faculty, various clubs and societies, and your friends – both your direct peer group and those older and younger than you. And those are just the elements to which you’re directly connected whilst you’re studying. What about when you leave? How do you fashion all of these elements into something that makes sense and advances your personal and professional life once you have completed your studies?
Your existence as an student or graduate contains a multitude of possibilities. How do you make the best of this? How do you live the best possible life you can live? In a world where we all suffer from an overload of information, choice and opportunity, the value of the personal connection is gaining in currency.
We live in the post dot.com era, whereby every conceivable activity you engage in offline – shopping, talking, fixing a deal, getting a date - can be accomplished online. So when it comes to networking, services like Facebook can help you engage and connect with fellow members of the academic community to mutual benefit. Facebook and other sites aim to gather together all the students and alumni of specific universities of and give them something as valuable as their degrees – a lifelong connection to each other.
There are now multiple websites devoted to student or business networking and to choose between them is almost an impossible task. But let’s look at what exactly networking means in to the post-old school tie generation.
What is networking?
In a nutshell, networking is the process of making contact and exchanging information with other people. It involves building relationships and creating a personal set of contacts that may be able to help you in some way and that you may be able to help in some way. Developing a network is a lifelong process, and there is no time like your time at university to learn how to do it and put it into practice.
You are about to enter into a highly competitive world in every respect: the people you meet will be educated, outgoing, well connected, and often well versed in the technicalities of building a personal network. Take the Ivy League universities as an example – they hold extra-curricular classes in networking. So upon leaving university you are competing with people who are trained to access, facilitate and capitalise upon networks around them. On a global level, you are up against the best of the best.
So what does the really mean for me, I hear you say…
There is more to networking than just having lots of mates. The more people you know, the more powerful you become. In his book “The Tipping Point” Malcom Gladwell makes a number of interesting points about the kind of people he calls ‘connectors’ – the ones that have an extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances.
Funnily enough, it’s the acquaintances, not the friends, that matter in this equation. Friends belong to your immediate circle, your college, your society, your sports team. Acquaintances, on the other hand, by definition belong to a very different environment from you. They give you access to worlds and opportunities to which you don’t belong.
The strength of these ‘weak ties’ has long been recognised as the proven principle that finds more people getting jobs – not through their closest friends, but through their friends’ friends’ contacts. Acquaintances represent social power.
If you know someone with many acquaintances, you already know the magnetism that these people wield. We all know someone we aspire to know because of their extensive personal contacts, someone we think may link us to the next great career opportunity, or social event, or flat-share. In short, as the founder of the online network Ecademy, Thomas Power, says “Connectedness equals attractiveness.” We want to be close to this kind of person.
The Ivy league universities have been exploiting this social phenomenon for decades. As soon as you matriculate, you have an inherent sense of what it means to be a part of a niche community, of what it means to have input into the group, and of the potential of the links you are able to take away and leverage.
The Commandments of Networking
Networking is not a black art. In fact, as soon as you meet someone you like you are probably adhering to the basic principles without even realising. Be interested, prepared, genuine and gracious, and always follow up. But to be clearer, here are some basic rules you may like to consider:
- Build relationships
Networking is attentively and consciously meeting people, being interested in them, remembering who they are and what they do, and exchanging information with them over time.
- Remember Networking Karma
If you do enough good for others, then others will come good for you. Don’t necessarily ask someone for a job immediately, but focus on their issues and on how the people you know can help them. Become part of their circle, and you will find you are given introductions that help you land the next big opportunity.
- Commit to competition
The world of networking is for the brave of heart. This article is not for you unless you are prepared to accept that the big wide world contains challenges to which you are unlikely to find the answers in your exam revision files.
- Obtain information about careers, organisations and roles
Learn about specific fields, or types of work that you are
interested in, even create your own job or internship: identify an activity or a type of work that you would like to do, and find someone who is willing to let
you do it.
Online networking
Regardless of how vibrant and extensive your network is, sometimes you get stuck with an issue and can’t find the right person with the right information at the right time. That is why social networking websites are emerging as a vehicle to make the networking process more efficient while attempting to preserve the nature of real one-to-one relationships.
There are a myriad of networks that have grown in the last year or so, weaving digital webs of people and encouraging them to take the practise of personal networking to a new level. Sites such as Ecademy, Friendster, and LinkedIn allow people to access resources that previously would have been out of bounds on the offline world. It’s networking without the wine and cheese. And it’s time for you to leverage the new boys and girls network.
Julia Barber
The Cornell Partnership
September 2006
