8) Professional Practice Week: Creating Social Networking - 26/1/18

During Professional Practice Week I decided to sign up to the networking lecture on Friday, giving you tips on how to network and how to improve your skills. My notes from the lecture can be seen below.

The woman started off the lecture by stating that 90% of creative jobs are 'hidden', or companies are made up of 5 people or less, meaning jobs aren't advertised. This means they are more likely to employ people they know, which is why networking is so important!

Before you start, you need to know your aims for networking with people. It's also helpful to learn some background knowledge about the people you want to network with if possible, reading up on the who's where's and why's. It's also great during networking to keep a record of who you speak to and why you may find them helpful. I hadn't thought of a lot of these points before, so I found this information really helpful.

We then went on to discuss who we have in our network already:

- friends and family, and friends of friends

- university contacts such as tutors, guest speakers, other students and alumni

- social media followers and followees on networks such as facebook, twitter, instagram, linkedin etc

- part time work / volunteering / internships / work experience

Looking into your immediate circle first helps with networking, and you never know who you may find who could be of help to you.

We also went on to discuss why employers eliminate people from considering them for jobs, for instances such as drugs, drink and provocative photos. Due to the online nature of our society today, employers can find out a lot of this information from our social media accounts, so this is why it's important to have separate work accounts, and keep your privacy settings high if you don't want people looking through your personal life. Another way to combat this elimination is to make sure your profiles are suitable for all audiences.

FACE TO FACE NETWORKING TIPS:

- You need to know who to approach and what to say

- Look for people's body language in a room, this is a good indicator of whether they want to converse with people or not

- Say your name, ask if you can join a conversation / look for a gap to appear in a circle of people, then ask about them! Ask for people's names and their job title, and then go on to ask other things. Questions like "who are useful contacts for you to meet here?" and "what do you do?" and "how did you get into this line of work?".

OTHER PREPARATION TIPS:

- Prepare questions and write them down incase you forget

- Save the employer you want to speak to most until last so you have more confidence and things to speak about, such as points from a talk you both saw etc

- Have someone else with you for confidence

- For formal career events dress as you would for a job interview, but otherwise smart / casual is fine

- Don't be afraid to say you're a student and trying to find out about a range of jobs.

- Make yourself available, e.g "I'm happy to work for two weeks for free for this opportunity".

Although the lecture was only an hour long I felt I learnt so many valuable tips for networking that I never knew before, and these will definitely go into practice now I'm looking for assisting jobs for professional practice. I feel it will also just generally help me speak to people in industry better as well, using some of the questions I learnt from this lecture to get to know about their work and how they work.

#professionalpractice #networking