Joel.Watson92@gmail.com | LinkedIn: /in/joel3rbear | Twitter: @Joel3rBear
Listened At: The Engineering Career Coach
In this episode Devora Zack, the author of Networking for People Who Hate Networking, talked to the hosts about tips to help with networking when you aren’t the most outgoing of personality types. One particularly helpful she said was that networking is done with meaningful one-on-one conversations, not talking in big groups. It’s about “connecting not collecting” so rather than aiming to talk to everyone at an event, use your study skills and learn all you can about a few “target” people who you want to meet. Prepare yourself with some questions and answers specific to those “target” people and some general ones in case you end up talking with someone else.
“If you aren’t following up, you’re not networking!” Devora recommends 2 or less days from initial contact to follow up. Make sure it’s before you forget each other. You want to have something meaningful to talk about that relates to what you talked about at the event. To remember what you talked about, she recommends that you take the time at the event to write down some notes after talking to specific people you plan to follow up with. Also, you ideally want to make yourself seem useful. One way she mentions is offering a useful article that relates to what you talked about or something.
I chose this podcast because I believe this is one area where I can greatly improve, and have not yet found my pace in. Networking and career development is intimidating and a real challenge for me and it helps to hear what experienced individuals are looking for when they talk to younger developers and what they expect.
From listening to this podcast, I got a lot of very relevant tips that I plan to use. One great recommendation was that you make a networking plan with goals that you can actually complete and check off so you have some feeling of progress. For me this will be attending 1 event a month. She also recommends coming up with a process that uses your strengths. For me this is targeting and researching people ahead of time so that I don’t have to worry so much about what I should say or who I should be talking to. These tricks along with her recommendations on ways to follow up will really help me calm my nerves as I continue to network and meet more developers.