Professional Networking and Career Advancement

Network, network, network. Everyone tells you to do it; few tell you how or why it is important. Yet, getting networking right is the career skill you need to succeed in good or trying times. And networking only when you need a job? Fail.

So what insights can be gained from successful networking people?

Fortunately, UpMo, in conjunction with Pepperdine, did a serious networking study that looked at how networking can help career advancement.

Some of the expected results:

• Networking is how people find positions, with more than 40% reporting networking resulted in jobs.
• Networking helps get higher paying positions.
• And although networking is a core skill, most believe that universities and corporations do a poor job in providing tools and opportunities for networking (corporations only care about your work helping the corporation achieve their goals; why would they help networking? …Scot).

More important to Cubicle Warriors, the study revealed how effective networkers do the work of networking:

• Elite networkers are proactive in their networking efforts.
• Elite networkers are equipped with, and are therefore more likely to use, advanced networking skills.
• Elite networkers leverage their networks to a larger degree than do
  other professionals; they also rely less on job sites during job searches.
• Because elite networkers believe more strongly in a correlation
  between networking and career advancement, elite networkers invest more time in networking than do other study respondents.

The study’s conclusions are available in a 29-page .pdf file report and can be downloaded with your e-mail address as a prerequisite. It is well worth reading as the results can point you in the right direction for building your networking practice.

Networking takes thought, consistency and practice. If you don’t have your approach to this job skill down cold and continuously improve it (and I don’t…), use this study as a first step to understanding networking’s importance and how much time and effort high earning career professionals use to build and maintain their networks.