How to communicate with your Network for a Career Change?
Communicating with the network for a career change Communicating with a network is very delicate since many more variables come into play than in other cases.
The preconceived idea people have you, for better or worse, in your closest relationships, can affect the assessment they might make of you when they point you towards or introduce you to companies and organisations. People who know you as friends are often not really able to assess your real potential in the workplace and only very rarely will they have had the opportunity or the desire to think about this in depth.
It therefore becomes a case of overcoming this obstacle, by presenting you with a few words that can be interpreted unambiguously, “who you are” from a professional perspective, so that your interlocutor can speak about you in the most effective manner.
However, it should be noted that friends are usually more important in the phase of gathering information, to help you to establish where you might focus your efforts and activate a network of additional contacts rather than in the phase where you implement the “plan”.
Indeed, as the stats demonstrate, second level contacts (those generated by our direct interlocutors) represent, in more than 75 % of cases, the route that leads to the resolution of the problem. In all countries of the world the interpersonal channel - the one involving word of mouth - is the one that most easily leads to effective job matching.
Word of mouth is thus the most widespread and effective channel (even though it is hardly ever the most efficient) for finding a new job! This does not mean that professional channels - which developed in the western world after the Second World War – cannot give candidates and companies a significant added value compared to the most traditional channel, in terms of both the speed and the quality of the matching and the assistance they offer in identifying the problem and getting people into a job.
But the search for a job and its fee - i.e. the
search for new employees by a company - has always been carried out even before
western legal systems allowed the emergence of private and qualified intermediaries.
For this reason, over time, companies and people have developed the habit of
meeting directly without the involvement of specialists.
What might you require to communicate with your network?
- A brief presentation
- A more detailed presentation
- An outline for a one on one meeting.
Before you do this you have to be clear about two things:
- what you have to offer
- what you want to ask for.
All of the above can be personalised on the basis of the interlocutor in terms of content, form, timeframes and procedures.
