Connections: The Door to Your Next Job
Are you striving to break into the career of your dreams upon graduation? Well it turns out that the recommended resume critique sessions, symposiums, and conferences in order to make yourself stand out isn’t nearly as important as Networking. Quality networking doesn’t always have to be trying to meet industry leaders in your field, but rather can start by taking a look at your own network and can consists of rekindling some long-term friendships.
Doctor Allison Duke (2011) found that 76% of people find jobs through their personal network. The remarkable breakthrough from the study was that most respondents found their job from acquaintances or people whom they rarely saw. This astonishing finding contradicts our society’s common logic where we instill more confidence in close friends being able serve a critical role in finding a job.
Doctor Allison Duke’s study reinforces our classroom discussion of how networks play an important role in deciding the fate of your next job. We discussed the power of strong and weak ties within networks. Aligned with this study, our Networks class learned how Mark Granovetter interviewed people on how they got their current job, where he discovered that a majority got their jobs from personal contacts. He discovered that theses subjects didn’t get their jobs from close friends, but rather from acquaintances that they “rarely” or “occasionally” saw. At first this discovery is startling but it begins to make sense when you understand how networks operate. The benefit of a weak tie is that you have an established relationship with another person, but you don’t interact with them on a regular basis.
As Dr. Duke (2011) points out, weak ties have different information and different clusters of network circles to connect you with multitude of information and contacts. Job seekers should look deep into their personal network to re-establish relationships with their weak ties in order to find an ideal career opportunity. Networking is an extremely beneficial tool to obtain the career path of your choice, but it starts with the groundwork that your willing to lay out personally and your willingness to reach out to people you know.
CDails21
Sources
Duke, A. (2011). Those “weak ties” may land your next job. Nashville Business Journal. http://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/blog/back_to_work/2011/10/those-weak-ties-may-land-your-next-job.html
Course textbook: Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World.