I think it’s true that we often view networking as a bottom-up proposition and not the other way around. That is, us younger people often ask our older, more experienced colleagues for their advice, their help, and their contacts, but those older colleagues (at least in my mind) would never come to us kids for any kind of assistance. A week and a half ago, I discovered this to be most decidedly not the case.
I had coffee with a colleague who is twenty years my senior. I met this colleague a few years ago when I was working with the National Council for International Visitors. At that time, he had been working for a large and well-known international exchange and development organization in DC for nearly 15 years. Though our paths crossed several times—at NCIV conferences, at joint advocacy meetings on the Hill during we which we argued gamely, and unsuccessfully, for more funds to be devoted to international exchange—when I left NCIV for Georgetown a year and a half ago, we weren’t exactly close.
Which was why I was surprised to get an email from him letting me know he was looking for a job and that he wanted to mine me for contacts and potential jobs in the university/international education setting. I was also surprised because, well, he’s older than me. Shouldn’t he have been looking up?
Not in his mind—he was just looking out. It didn’t matter to him that I was much younger and that all I had to offer in terms of concrete help was the names of a few others at Georgetown I thought he should talk with. To him, this was a successful networking encounter. Who knows where those contacts I gave him might lead? And who knows where our relationship might lead at some unknown juncture down the road?
Meeting with this colleague reminded me of two essential facets of networking: 1) get to know people for who they are and not simply because they offer some immediate good—you never know where that relationship might lead; and 2) networking is not a bottom-up proposition. Anyone and everyone can and should be a valuable part of your network, regardless of their age and experience level.
My encounter with this colleague also illustrated for me the brutal reality of the working world. Despite the fact that he was an experienced and accomplished professional and the leader of a project and at the same organization for more than 15 years, when funding for his project unexpectedly ran dry, he found himself out of a job and unhappily bouncing from consulting gig to consulting gig, looking to get himself back in the international exchange game after this unexpected mid-career crisis. Thus why he was meeting with me—and many, many other people, I presumed.
He told me that, for the first several months after he lost he job, he figured his resume would do the talking for him, so he spent the majority of his time searching and applying for jobs at the managerial level. However, despite his years in the field, this approach yielded zero results. He began to feel like so many young people do when they apply for that first entry level job and receive no calls or emails in response—that these applications were just floating off into the nether regions of the Internet, never to be read by anyone.
Eventually my colleague realized that he was going about it all wrong—he needed to be not sitting in front of a computer but out talking with people, making contacts, trying to find personal leads to job openings. Despite all the knowledge and experience he had accrued throughout his twenty-year career, when it came time to reenter a job search this far along the way, it was still who he knew that seemed to matter most.
He also told me that, as far as networking was concerned, in many ways, he was starting from scratch. This was because his work at his former organization had been very insular and he’d been “a big fish in a small pond,” as he put it. He was in charge of his particular project and a head honcho in that particular world, but beyond that…. He’s now finding that his contacts are limited in scope, confined completely to his particular international exchange world, and he’s frustrated with his lack of contacts in other areas.
His advice to avoid this pitfall? “If you’re young, be a part of something big; or, if not big, then be an important part of something small where your work will become known on a bigger scale.”
