Weak ties in Career Buidling. Is networking really that important?
Personally, I always viewed social “weak ties” to be a settlement for the absence of strong ties in your life. Especially, growing up with television media, many shows and movies highlighted this best friend relationship that every successful protagonist needs to conquer the world. And, yes, strong relationships can become your biggest comforts, especially as we navigate the rigidness and cold tips of reality. However, I feel that the importance of weak ties is only something that I was exposed to later on in life. After coming to college, the pressure to establish your career has become a big pursuit because it measures your success and aptitude. As a result, I feel as if going to networking events and building connections have become more emphasized than finding true friendships. While I don’t necessarily agree that connections should serve as a greater priority than personal relationships, I acknowledge the need to put effort into expanding your networks and sustaining the weak ties in your life.
In class, we learn about distinguishing strong ties from weak ones and visa versa. As we also read about the triadic closure, we learn that this concept is what establishes and distinguishes these connections in our lives. Moreover, we observe instances of quantifying the intangible markers of relationships and connections. This method of quantifying ties lead me to research more about the importance of weak ties and how these ties greatly attribute to networking. In the journal I read, Granovetter conducted a study to assess how important weak ties are to career success. His findings concluded that the best job leads come from acquaintances rather than your tight-knit friend group. Surveying 282 Boston-based workers, he found that 84% of the study group attained their current jobs through weak-tie relationships. These numbers were shocking. While I did expect that this number would be substantial, it was a whopping 84%. The majority of the people tested found jobs through mere acquaintances.
And upon thinking of this further, this survey’s results also make complete sense. I see this occurring in my friend group as well. Within my group, most of my friends, including myself, are majoring in STEM and plan to pursue occupations in tech. While I feel that I could benefit from having this fallback community, I feel that in order to truly expand your goals and strive for greater success, having people that you could contact outside your focus of work are crucial. So, to answer the original question, is networking really that important? Yes, because it’s those weak ties that will get you jobs or expand your goals, or both. The connotation of “weak” is never positively assuring, but with the study that we observed, I hope that this could have encouraged those against weak ties to adopt a new perspective. And I was certainly one of those people.