Developing Your Business Network

By: Colleen Davis

According to a study done, some 80% of available jobs are never advertised, and over half of all employees obtain their jobs through networking. This just means that newspaper or advertising flyers are not your most important source for a successful job search. It is in fact your network that gives you a career.

Families, friends, and even former colleagues are valuable resources and information about specific job openings that are not publicly posted or have yet to be advertised. This inside information is very valuable because it gives you a competitive advantage because you get a first hand description of the company, what it does, and what it looks for in an employee. Relationships, we must accept, is key to opening up a world of opportunities, enjoyment, and efforts that can have a major impact on a person, company, or community.

There are many ways to enhance your network. Let me discuss some of the most common ones:

Professional associations
As the saying goes, ‘birds of the same feather flock together.’ Where else can you get information about openings in a particular field but through colleagues in the same field? Most of these associations maintain a group email and this is where you can either post a vacancy or look for a job.

Social networks
These networks have the potential to expand your networking capabilities to a global scale. Social networks are crafted through websites that allow users to connect with each other by displaying photos and personal information and using a communication system, either through messages or IM.

Personal branding is what you want to achieve. You want to be known in your field as an expert, a meticulous engineer, a respected lawyer, etc. Your personal brand is your total perceived value, relative to competitors, as viewed by your audience. With social networking, your total perceived value is a collective sum of your profile picture and the content that you produce on the site. The audience in this case is any visitor to your social network page. Consider your personal web page in this social network as your elevator pitch to potential employers.

Family and Friends
There is nothing better than a referral from a family member or a close friend. This is the ultimate network because you can never go wrong by using this.

Always remember the saying that suggests to never burn bridges because you will never know when you have to cross it in the future. Networking is all about addition, never about subtraction.