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On the Net and In the Flesh: Good Advice for Professional Networking |
February 12, 2006 |
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Posted by Don Dunnington at February 12, 2006 04:18 PM |
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In "Networking on the Network" UCLA associate professor Phil Agre sets out a detailed plan (66,000 words) for PhD students to develop the professional networking skills needed to advance their careers.
His advice is on the mark for engineers and other knowledge workers as well. As befits an MIT PhD whose research interests range from information technology and institutional change to Internet culture, Agre recognized the potential of the Internet for professional networking way back in 1993, when he wrote the first version of this article.
In thinking about Agre's advice for PhDs, it seems clear that the burden to "publish or perish" has also been an advantage academics have over other professions in terms of (a) finding peers with similar professional interests, (b) building and gaining visibility in a mutually beneficial professional network, and (c) publicly sharing knowledge and expertise in print and public presentations.
If you think that it's only academics who need to develop this sort of personalized professional network, you're living in the wrong century. The growing power of online media – websites, blogs, podcasts and vlogs (video blogs) – is transforming every company into a media company, and every knowledge worker into an online reporter, editor and publisher (over internal intranets as well as the Internet).
Agre provides two tips for creating a customized professional network specific to your interests and abilities:
Articulate the commonalities you discover you have with others (which includes exploring differences). "The principle of articulating commonalities is the secret to getting along with people," Agre writes.
Find a "structural hole" in your profession that you can help fill. "A structural hole, intuitively speaking, is a bunch of people who don't know each other but ought to."
How can you find and build your own network using the Internet? "To begin with," Agre writes, "the most fundamental way of finding people online is to help them find you." The easiest way to do that is through a blog like this. If you're not blogging, or commenting on blogs, you're missing a really easy and powerful way for people of like interests to find you.
This should be a no-brainer for engineers who sell process equipment. But the potential benefits of blogging may be even greater for those who buy and use the equipment. Articulating your process needs and ideas online gives you the possibility of the sort of serendipitous results that come when you fill one of those "structural holes." Not to mention it gives you professional visibility in an age when invisibility can be a real drag on your career.
Don Dunnington
