Don’t Make These Professional Networking Mistakes

Zaheer is an experienced Project Management Professional focused on ecommerce and web applications.

  Career Development  

Professional networking is vital for securing business opportunities and accelerating your professional growth. From giving back to your profession and community to finding volunteers that support your cause, from finding mentors to getting leads and prospects for expanding your business, professional networking is important for individuals and organizations alike.

Yet while we all know about its importance, many of us fail to reap its benefits. Let’s try to understand these reasons through a few lessons I’ve learned over the past few years:

• Simply connecting to a bunch of random people on a website or community is not professional networking. Having a huge number of connections on LinkedIn or a similar platform does not mean that you have a big professional network.
• Attending several events, whether in person or virtually, and meeting a lot of people once or twice does not guarantee that your professional network is growing.

No doubt, these activities may bring you one step closer to being an effective networker, but they don’t guarantee securing more opportunities or business.

If you truly want to leverage your network, you need to actually know your network. Let’s take LinkedIn as an example, as it’s one of the most well-known professional networking tools. On LinkedIn, you receive so many messages every day where people try …

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