I was working with a client last year on her plans for finding a new role. She was capable, experienced, and had a clear view of what she wanted next, but when we came on to the topic of networking, she visibly cringed.
“I know I need to do this,” she said, “but the thought of walking into an event or messaging someone I don’t know that well makes me want to bury my head in the sand.”
I completely understood. Every profiling tool I’ve ever done confirms that I lean more towards introvert than extrovert, and I’d choose dinner with a few friends over a big party any time. What I’ve had to work out over the years is how to do enough networking to keep my career moving – not to love it, not to become great at it, but just enough to keep moving and stay connected to the right people. There are still events I go to where the discomfort is there and I’m very deliberately in it for the benefit rather than the experience. That’s fine – it turns out that’s been enough.
Much of the advice out there about networking assumes a level of comfort that a lot of people just don’t have. For many of the women I work with, it can feel like being told to do something designed for a different kind of person entirely – yet in the meantime the career keeps on moving, and the moments that really test a network tend to arrive on their own schedule.
Why it tends to lapse
Even for people who are more comfortable with it, networking tends to move through natural phases. There are periods when you’re engaged, connected, meeting interesting people, feeling relatively energised by it, and then there are others when it tends to drop off.
The busiest periods are the obvious culprit – when the workload is relentless and everything else in life is demanding attention, it’s easy to let staying connected to your wider network slide to the bottom of the very long list. Periods of lower confidence can do the same thing too – when you’re not feeling great about where things are, putting yourself out there, even with people who already know you, feels like it takes more than it offers back.
The drift tends to happen without conscious decision – it just stops or tapers off, and there’s just that niggle popping up now and then that you need to get back to.
A client I worked with had let her broader network lapse almost entirely – there simply hadn’t been time for years. Then redundancy arrived unexpectedly and she found herself starting a job search with very little in place. She was talented and experienced, but the connections, the conversations, the knowledge of who was where out there and what might be possible – none of it was there when she needed it. She told me afterwards – “I knew I should have kept it up. I just never quite got around to it until I realised I had no choice.”
The risk here isn’t only redundancy – it also shows up when you’re thinking about a move and realise you don’t have a strong read on what the market looks like right now, or when an opportunity comes up and there’s nobody well-placed to say your name in the right room, or when you’re navigating something difficult and there’s no trusted person outside the organisation to think it through with.
A strong professional network isn’t something you build in a hurry when you need it. It’s something that’s there because you’ve been tending to it all along.
What a strong network is actually for
Part of the reason it gets deprioritised is that we tend to think of networking in transactional terms – something you do when you’re job hunting or need an introduction, and therefore not relevant the rest of the time.
The networks that really serve people’s careers tend to do something more than that. They provide honest perspective from people who know you well enough to give it. They include people with genuine influence who will speak up for you in conversations you’re not part of. They give you access to how things look from a different organisation, sector, or vantage point – which is worth more than most people realise until they’ve spent a long time in a bubble. They also include people who will stretch your thinking, rather than just validate it. In many ways, this is about having the right people in your career corner, rather than simply collecting contacts.
Warmth and goodwill matter in a network, and so does proximity to the conversations that count. It’s worth being honest with yourself about whether the people around you are genuinely doing these things, rather than simply being contacts you’re on good terms with.
A quick network audit
Whatever your relationship with networking – whether you find it draining, manageable, or genuinely enjoyable – it’s worth pausing periodically to take stock of what you’ve actually got. A few questions worth sitting with:
- Who in your network genuinely understands the quality of your work – not just your job title, but the actual value you create – and is close enough to the right conversations to speak credibly about it?
- Do you have people who will honestly challenge your thinking, rather than just support it? Encouragement is valuable; honest challenge is rarer and often more useful. Those conversations are often what help us step back and think more strategically about where we’re heading.
- Is your network broad enough? Long tenure in one organisation or sector can mean it grows deep but not wide – and when you need external perspective or a different kind of opportunity, it isn’t there.
- When did you last have a proper conversation with someone outside your immediate world – not a quick check-in, but a real exchange that left you thinking differently about something?
- Who have you been meaning to reconnect with for months and haven’t?
That last one tends to be the most useful starting point, less because it’s the most strategic and more because it’s the most honest answer to where things actually are – and it’s one of the easiest points to act upon.
What this can look like in practice
For my client who cringed at the thought of events, we didn’t build a plan around attending more of them. We built one around what would actually work for her – joining a technical community where she could contribute on her own terms, setting up short one-to-one conversations with peers in adjacent teams, taking on a cross-functional project that expanded her internal network as a natural by-product of the work itself.
None of it felt like her original view of what networking meant. It felt like doing things she was interested in, with people she wanted to know better. The career benefit came through the relationships themselves, not through any kind of performance.
If events work well for you, use them. The goal isn’t to prescribe a method – it’s to make sure your network is there, doing what you need it to do, rather than something you’ll get around to when things are less busy.
As with most things in a career, the best time to tend to it is before you need it.
If you’d like help thinking through where your network currently is and where the gaps might be, it’s something I work through with clients regularly. Feel free to send me a message or book a call via the link in my profile.
You may also find these articles useful: