Career Building – Acquiring Information and Finding Opportunities within Your Network

What’s the whole point of building a network? Is it to find cool people to hang out with? This happens typically, but the real goal is to gather information and eventually find those unique opportunities that create success for you. Opportunities are interesting things – they are simply opportunities. iFor your career, t is the act of recognizing an opportunity when it occurs and being able to execute on that opportunity that makes all the difference. Your goal should be to use your professional network to help you go out and find the opportunities.

Great opportunities are rare. You don’t want any old opportunity. What you want to capitalize on are the career changing ones. These extend your competitive advantage or accelerate your Plan A or Plan B. Your career will probably not be a rocket to the top. You will have several different career-changing opportunities that come in the way of break-throughs, deals, or discoveries.

On your resume, you probably have your last series of jobs in reverse chronological order. You probably formatted all your jobs the same. This is actually misleading and your career does not physically develop like that. Every one of us has had breakout projects, connections, opportunities, and luck.

Career Building – Creating Real Relationships

We all know the stories of the teenagers that work to get thousands of “friends” on Facebook. Over time, this is achievable, but what have you really gained? A giant network of people that you have no real connection with and they probably don’t even know anything about you as a real person. Even if you did this same thing on LinkedIn, you have not really created a valuable professional network – nobody has any real incentive to help anyone.

What you should be after is a smaller network of real people who have a real connection to you. These are people with whom you have a real incentive to help and they have a real incentive to assist you…as well as the capability to do so.
Does this sound familiar? “I did not even know this position was available. It wasn’t listed. A friend of my buddy at Company X tipped me off to it.” Of course it does. This is how most people find out about job openings. Yes, recruiters are great and have their place. But, there is nothing like a personal connection to open career door for you.

In fact, that is EXACTLY how I achieved my current role. My company laid me off due to a reduction in force. My wife had a connection and they tipped her off to the fact that this company was in need of an Instructional Designer and hiring again. Within a week, I had the position.

Bottom Line: You need to invest in your personal network to grow your career.