Building connections from the inside

Once you’re in your new role and on the inside of a business, your options for networking will grow. So, who should you be networking with?

Colleagues

This is the easiest place to start as most of them will be actively engaged in getting to know you too! Building rapport and trust with the people around you will create better working relationships and be more likely to lead to opportunities for development.

Watch this short video from Litmos about building rapport with the team around you for some hints and tips.

Contacts of colleagues

Once you’ve got to know your colleagues better, you might be able to gain access to some of their contacts. Connecting with them on LinkedIn will give you a view of who they are connected with, and you could ask them for an introduction to anyone you’d like to talk to. You will also be able to see which LinkedIn groups they are members of. Perhaps you could join too.

Having conversations with the people around you about things you’d like to understand better, skills you’d be keen to develop, groups you’d like to join, etc. might lead you naturally to a comment such as ‘do you know anyone who could help me with that?’

Clients

If you have regular clients who you can build a relationship with, you could gain a valuable perspective about the sector you are working in and there may be opportunities to build that connection further through mentoring or even a sabbatical within their company. These experiences can be useful to both you and your SME employer in terms of gathering wider knowledge and experience.

Sector wide networking

Connections can be made in a variety of ways, for example through attending conferences, joining relevant peer groups supported by professional bodies or training associations or posting on social media and responding to those who comment on your posts.

Maintaining your connections

It’s very easy to collect numerous contacts on LinkedIn and then forget who everyone is or how you met them! The way to stop this from happening is to maintain your connections.

Depending on how many people you are connected to, you might need to prioritise your list or devise some different categories that require different levels of attention.

‘I have way too many social media connections, but I do want to keep in touch with most of them, so I’ve decided to sort them into categories. I’ve now got a shortlist of people who might be able to help with my next career steps and I’m working on one of people who are really well connected across the industry and might be able to introduce me to someone useful at some point. I also want to create a list of people who I really like and enjoy being connected with!’ Niels, BEng Music Technology

When you’ve created your categories, you might connect with each of these groups in different ways – through social media, via email or even by arranging face to face meetings. You might also decide to reach out to some of them more often than others in order to maintain an appropriate connection.

Over to you

Spend a few minutes thinking about what you do to keep in touch with your social network at the moment. Don’t just think about your work contacts, consider friends and family too, but focus on the people you don’t see every day. Do you proactively send them occasional texts, respond to the things they talk about on social media, pick up the phone regularly, get in touch when you see something you think they’ll find useful/laugh at etc.?

If you have a method that works for you – consider how you might use that with your career connections too. If you want to – share it with your fellow learners in the comments below.