A year or so into my job within the Burberry HQ, a real dream come true and amazing company, I realised that my skill sets weren’t suited to any job that already existed – I needed to work for myself. Which meant that very soon I wouldn’t have the comfort of hiding behind this huge brand and would actually have to go out there and make a name for myself. I made up my mind and made a plan. First task on the to-do list: NETWORK!
This could mean many different things to different people but for me, I had 3 main objectives:
Meet new people/make industry contacts
Build upon my confidence
Make people aware of what I am good at/have achieved
That’s the first step! Figure out why you, (insert your name), want to get out there and network. Once you’ve decided on a few clear objectives you can begin to narrow down your plan of attack. Now let’s go through the others, I promise this won’t be painful at all:
Online Vs. offline
It’s 2017, Donald Trump has twitter fingers, Kim Kardashian is back on Instagram and you and all your friends are actually enjoying Facebook again! The internet is a real thing and we can’t ignore it. Therefore, before you physically going out and connect with the world, take some time to sort out your online presence on LinkedIn, The Dots or any other professional platform you may be on. More and more connections are being made online. Think about how many InMail messages you can send in a minute, compared to the amount of events you can attend in a day. A useful tip I will share is to use the same profile picture on all sites – a very small way to build a uniformed presence.
1 Comment