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Colonel Prashant Rawal
Nov 5, 20223 min read

Personal Networking: A Help or Hazard

General

Networking can open doors to fresh opportunities for many shy ones that might be out of reach otherwise. Your network can be an excellent source of new perspectives and ideas to help you in your present and future role. It offers you fresh viewpoints by providing new information on challenges you are facing, enhances the experience, and helps you set goals you want to achieve.

Personal Network

A personal network is a group of contacts known to an individual, with whom that individual would expect to interact from time to time with reference to certain activities. In other words, a personal network is a group of like-minded people who are committed to maintaining a relationship with a person in order to support a given set of activities. Having a strong personal network requires being connected to a network of resources for mutual growth.

Constituents of Personal Network

The essential constituents of a personal network can be explained as:

  1. Who knows you?

  2. What you know about them?

  3. What they know about you?

  4. What are you learning together?

  5. How beneficial are you to the network?

Prognosis

Personal networking is essentially the practice of developing and maintaining a personal network, which is usually undertaken over an extended period. Most people have personal networks of varying variety and extent. Here you retain decision about who joins in. Personal networks include relationships with the people that you feel closest to—friends, family, and guides—and the people you meet through things like professional associations as well as personal-interest communities. You decide who belongs in this network according to your personal goals and affinities.

Advantages you Gain

A good personal network:

  1. Helps galvanize high spirits.

  2. Provide new opportunities through personal references.

  3. Widens your professional involvement and horizons outside work.

  4. Offers developmental support such as coaching or mentoring.

  5. Provides you with the starting point and impetus when you are looking for a new job or career advice.

  6. Helps you advance your career and improve your interpersonal skills over time.

The Strategy

It is important that you plan out what kind of personal networking strategy will work best for you, and then focus on making it a positive experience. As a result, networking will become more of a fun way to learn new things in no time.

Your network must reorient itself externally and toward the future as you move up the ladder of success. It helps you in ascertaining that your ladder is resting on the right wall. 

Thus it is important that one shouldn’t limit oneself to traditional networking circles only. Having a good circulation with diverse groups increases your chances of receiving referrals and job opportunities. Your chance to run into different people may provide you with a learning opportunity of different dimensions.

Be at It

Personal networking needs a significant amount of time and energy. Due to this reason many of us stop networking, precisely when we need it most, say searching for a new job. It happens because we see our personal circle as something totally detached from our daily work. Personal networks are meant to be collectively beneficial, extending the idea of teamwork past the immediate peer group. Benefits accrue in you looking for potential synergies between your personal and professional contacts so that each circle enriches and strengthens the other at the time of need.

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