"It's not what you know, it's who you know" is something I've heard again and again throughout my life, but not something I fully understood the significance of until I joined the world of work. I don't know about you but until relatively recently, whenever I heard the word networking, it conjured up a not so pleasant image of a suave but slimy person sucking up to a senior manager, getting to know him or her simply in the hope that one day he might bag himself a job or promotion. It wasn't an image I wanted to emulate.
Networking can mean different things to different people, but I've come to view it simply as getting to know people by chatting to them and thereby becoming more familiar with parts of the business. It might not sound exciting or professional, but it's a simple strategy that often works. When starting out in a business, or even when looking for a job, it can be hard even knowing what's out there. When I started working, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, or even what area I wanted to work in, and even now my ideas about where I want to end up are changing.
It sounds very cheesy but I feel that your career should be about the journey, not the destination, and in fact the destination of your journey might shift or change completely in your first, fifth, or even fiftieth year of work. The best way of finding out exactly where it is you want to go is by talking to people; whether this is chatting to people in different areas of the business at an event, or emailing someone specific and inviting them for coffee to have a chat about a project they are working on. BT is a big company to work for, employing more than 97,000 people globally. That's a lot of competition for promotions and internal jobs, and while simply knowing people is not enough to secure success, sometimes making the effort to get to know someone can set you apart from a huge pool of otherwise equally skilled and eager employees.
Now, I'm not implying you'll have an unfair advantage over any other candidates by applying for a job working for someone who you've bonded with over a shared love of chunky KitKats, but sometimes just by informally chatting to people and by finding out more about them or their team, you may know more about the job you're applying for, and may be better able to convey your enthusiasm, or show them with even more clarity why you'd be the ideal candidate. By talking to someone new at an event, or by meeting someone for an informal discussion over coffee, you may discover a potential opportunity you weren't previously aware of – or even discover an area of the business or a job you didn't even know existed.
When I first starting working for BT, I wasn't sure what area of business I wanted to work in. I had enjoyed marketing at university, so thought I might enjoy it. However, now I've started working and learnt more about the business and the many opportunities it has, I've realised that I am more interested in human resources. Since this discovery, I've used the contacts I already have, previous managers and fellow graduates, for example, to recommended people they think I might be interested to talk to, or people who might be able to tell me more about different areas of HR. Because I'm genuinely interested in what I'm asking about, I don't feel like I'm sucking up or being fake by arranging informal meetings with people who might be able to help my career development. On the contrary, people are often only too happy to have a chat about their own career and the job they do today, and even if you discover it's not something you're interested in, it's something to cross off the list of potential career moves.
