Is Networking Important?

Hello and welcome back to my blog! I hope you have been having a great day. I wanted to use this Monday to not only talk about an advertising career in the Marketing Mondays series, but to draw your attention to the importance of networking. I hope you enjoy reading and take away valuable information from it.

Whether you are in high school, university, or in the middle of your career... networking is useful and necessary for your success.

Networking in high school can be as simple as attending the job fair at your school or the school's assembly with a special guest speaker. However, it could be as big as getting coffee with an employee at your dream company or going to a conference to listen to individuals in the careers you are interested in. Networking in high school is useful because it opens the door to different career interests, career paths, and opportunities to establish a relationship with someone successful... to possibly have a connection to a future job or to just hear what they experienced studying a certain subject.

Networking in university can take many forms, from conferences, clubs, job fairs, events, and so on. For example, Thompson Rivers University has a job fair every year that allows students to meet individuals that work in nearby companies and connect face to face. It is a great way to see if you would want to work for the company one day, get your questions answered quickly, such as "What jobs do you have in marketing or sales for university students?", get information, and personally hand your resume. Who knows, you could make a great first impression with a company that could lead to an interview! Networking will be an essential for any student wanting to move across the country, continent, or world, because knowing people will allow you to know quickly when there is a job opening and even get you offered a job because of how well the company already knows you and the skills you can bring to the job.

As for networking in the middle of your career, it is common to switch career paths or work for a new company. What makes this easier is knowing people that can make that transition flow better for you.

**As a side note, networking is a two-way street...so you cannot expect someone to provide you a new job or tell you a job opening without you providing the same opportunities to them. You don't need to network with everyone, just with the people you believe are important to have a connection with. **

Your connections can be the way you find out that your dream company is hiring or there is a job opening perfect for you.

As you probably understand now, everyone can network! However it is important to know the how you can network and how it can benefit you. I decided to describe my experience using LinkedIn and the benefits I find in it.

To the left is an image I took of my LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is a site to display your academic achievements, projects, employment history, volunteer experience, and other things you would have on your resume... just on a digital platform.

LinkedIn is not like Facebook or Instagram, for the simple reason that it is for professional use only. You definitely won't see posts of someone buying a new dog or getting their license, but you can expect to see photos of a conference someone attended or a job opening. There are over 400 million people in the world that have a LinkedIn account, which means that the opportunity to connect with someone in a career you want or in companies you admire is endless! Since I created a LinkedIn profile last semester I have connected with over 800 individuals that either:

- are in school studying a subject similar to me

- are in a career I am interested in having in the future

- have the same academic interests as me

- have the same passion as me

- work in a company I'd want to work for in the future

Interacting with individuals and learning from them is the type of learning that you don't learn in the classroom. It is valuable and learned through experience.

I hope you gained valuable information and I encourage you to create a LinkedIn profile if you haven't already and if you have... to make more connections and message a few individuals that you could learn from!

Link to my LinkedIn --> https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlyzavera/

#networking #networks #LinkedIn #advice