“Networking is the exchange of information and ideas among people with a common profession or special interest, usually in an informal social setting. Professionals use networking to expand their circles of acquaintances, find out about job opportunities in their fields, and increase their awareness of news and trends in their fields or the greater world “ (Julia Kagan).

Everyone has been networking even without being conscious of it. It starts with your family, then school, hobbies, jobs, traveling and from daily basis situations such as going to café. Think about 3 people that have had an important influence in your life. You’ll be quick to know that the list is pretty long because there’s always a possibility to network.

Here are 4 reasons why networking is important to your career development:

1. Networking contributes to your social well-being
2. Networking leads to the exchange of ideas 
3. Networking helps you meet people at all professional levels
4. Networking boosts your professional confidence

Maintaining relationships

Network is like a friendship that you must maintain. It’s important to nourish these relationships and keep them strong otherwise there’ll be no benefits from it. You can maintain the relationship in different ways, whether it is a Christmas card or whatsapping them. But the more you listen to the person who you are networking with the easier it gets. Networking serves as an avenue to create long term relationships with mutual benefits so you have to be able to be the listener in the conversation in a way that you’re sincerely interested not just waiting for your own turn. Knowing how to ask good questions rather than just talking about yourself. This way you know about the person and when later in life if you see an article or something that could be beneficial to them you can just send it to them. However, if you don’t listen to the person, you’ll be not able to maintain the relationship because you don’t know or remember anything from it.

Networking & Proakatemia

Proakatemia is an excellent platform for networking. You can network with other students from other teams in pajas. Get to know to people that know about sales, marketing etc, something that you may want to learn. You can network in the events that are being held or simply while doing different kinds of projects with different kinds of people. It’s important to not have a prejudice about anyone, you never know what kind of knowledge that person can bring to you without getting to know them. So be open to conversations with different kinds of people. Revena has benefitted from many projects even if the projects were not a total success the people that we met during the project turned out to be a great partnership in the future.

Lähteet:

https://www.betterup.com/blog/networking