Priming your Network

Dr. Joseph Barber

I don’t like DIY. In my experience, “doing it yourself” often turns into “damaging it yourself”. The simple act of hanging a decent-sized mirror turns into a 4-hour adventure involving drilling holes, patching the holes there were just drilled, waiting for the filler to dry, trying again, failing, re-patching, and so on. Painting a room is less traumatic, but the process of priming the wall before you actually paint it can sometimes feel a little redundant (especially when most of it seems to end up on me anyway). 20140817_230624Surely, the top coat of paint could or should do whatever magical thing the coat of primer does. As far as I can tell, primer helps the final coat of paint stick to the wall more effectively. It gives the shiny, colourful paint something to hold onto. As I was awkwardly perched upon a ladder over the weekend, precariously applying my primer on the ceiling, I wondered if this might be a good analogy for the process of networking.

In many cases, the goal of networking is to help people find the job or career path they are looking for. While your ultimate or final goal might be getting the job, there are many goals along the way that you still need to focus on.

  • There is the goal of making yourself some networking goals – so that you are approaching this activity strategically. This is what makes networking different from just randomly bumping into people.
  • There is the goal of doing some background research into different careers fields so that you know what questions to ask, and who might be able to answer them for you.
  • There is the goal of reaching out to the right people, in the right way, to encourage them to respond. Chances are your first outreach to contacts will be to ask them about what they do, how they got where they are today, and to get some insight into their specific role or organization.
  • There is the goal of sharing information about yourself to the people you meet with, so that they remember key information about who you are, what you have done or can do, and how they can help you. This is key. People need to know how they can help you before they can, well…, help you. You need to be able to articulate what your goals are to the people with you meet so that they are aware of them.

Let’s get back to the painting analogy, for a second. Reaching out to Penn alumni and other contacts you make is like applying the glossy topcoat of paint. It should be the culmination of the process that includes the steps listed above – especially developing your networking goals. Without all of this preparation, your networking might not stick (like my paint, it will just peel off the walls). If you haven’t done background research into career fields, if you haven’t identified the right person to talk to, if you haven’t identified the right questions to ask, if you haven’t developed a narrative you can use to talk about yourself, and if you haven’t identified what you goals are, then your interaction with new contacts might seem to go well at a superficial level (while you are meeting), but you probably won’t make the best impression. Your name/face/experience might not stick in the minds of your new connections as well, or for as long, as you hoped.

Let’s take an even more straightforward example. You have a very broad network of friends and family – everyone does. It would be impossible for you to know all of the people that all of your friends and family know. They know lots of people in professional settings. That’s great, but you still need to be able to connect with some of these potential contacts. Your friends and family probably won’t start randomly contacting you with suggestions for people you should talk to in different career fields from their networks, because that would just be strange. I know someone who works at Disney, but I don’t keep telling people in my network that they should contact this person, because they don’t want to work at Disney or in the entertainment industry. So, my Disney contact continues to exist in my network – I might not even think about my Disney contact for months at a time. Only once someone tells me that their goal would be to work in the entertainment industry would I suddenly think to myself, “Hey, I know someone at Disney – I should offer to put them in contact”. Until your friends, family, and other professional contacts know what type of information or connections you are seeking (one of your networking goals), they cannot tap into their own networks to help you.

So, prime your network by first identifying and then verbalizing your networking goals. You’ll find that your efforts get much more traction and you’ll make much more progress because you’ll be altogether stickier in people’s minds. That doesn’t sound so good, now that I have written it, but it sounds so much better than peeling off someone’s mind and falling to the floor – like my mirror is probably going to do!

Author: Joseph

Joseph Barber is a Senior Associate Director at Career Services serving graduate students and postdocs. He has a PhD in animal behaviour and animal welfare, and continues to teach these subjects as an adjunct professor at Hunter College (CUNY).