Future of professional networking 🧙‍♂️

📸 Photo credit - Campaign creators on Unsplash!

📕 Table of contents

• What is professional networking?
• Why need professional networking?
• Benefits of professional networking
• Modern day solutions to professional networking
• Using social media for professional networking
• Why I love peerlist?
  • Things that could make it even more stand out
• Bonus tips for efficient networking
• Conclusion

🎯 What is professional networking?

Professional networking is the sheer act of making relationships or acquaintances with the people closely associated with your career or in your professional domain. This has a lot of upsides given that we’re living in a social world and we’re all dependent on each other to grow as a community.

You can think of it as making friends in your first day of school but specifically with people in your area of interest, which will help you grow mutually and learn from each other’s insights.

🤝 Why need a professional network?

A network becomes a part of your life. You should not just network for sake of networking but rather see it as a means to build real deep connections and friendships that go a long way. But still if you’re not convinced to go out of your way to network, think about the countless benefits that can come as a result.

💼 Benefits of Professional Networking

Well, in todays day and age every other person is connected to thousands online and they in turn multiply to millions and so on. Thus making your network more and more vast. Imagine hiring as a startup, if you’re networked with hundreds of skilled developers you can gather a team of best engineers with a mere tweet and they in turn can refer few great team workers too!!

Plus as a human being, there’s always a need for fresh perspectives on your work or in general which your network can play a great role in providing. You can always get help and share your expertise in your network that makes you a better person too. Ultimately at any point of time, we all need advise on our career and lives in general, guess who’ll come to your help?

✅ Modern day solutions to Professional Networking

I mention modern day, because there are innumerable ways to interact and network with others today. It’s not just one website or mass media, it’s everywhere you go. You can choose to join a professional community (like a meetup group in your area), attend networking events or community conferences (like react_india) to gain more expertise in your domain.

But provided all of them are high effort 😅 and you might have tendencies to procrastinate, there are solutions that you can use from the comfort of your home. These online social networking platforms were made for one purpose for you to connect with the world but not every social media can be used for professional networking. Thus we have mediums like, Peerlist and LinkedIn etc.

📺 Using social media for professional networking

We’ll you asked why this post was called, future of professional networking this is it. Today’s mass communication mediums are not TV and newspaper, they are massive networks like LinkedIn and Twitter. These apps are although very good at too many things but over time have been turned into so much more that it almost feels betraying their primary purpose, connecting people.

Almost every one reading this must have a LinkedIn at one point of time, but using that platform is a hurdle in itself. Their news feed is dying out of scarcity of legit posts and with no correction mechanism there are bazzilions of other unrelated to professional posts which blows my head.

A professional network should not only be useful to make connections but also remain ad-free and distraction free platform only meant to genuinely form connections. It should not only solve a problem of networking but also showcasing specific skills that you have, rather than keeping it tightly knit inside your A4 sized sheet. And I don’t have to explain how terrible it is to handover your resumes or links to all your social portfolios, everytime someone asks for it.

A social media professional network platform shall care for all of this.

💚 Why I love Peerlist?

It is not just a method to connect with people on the internet. It is your homeplace on the internet that can serve as your digital portfolio. I recently signed up to Peerlist (only wishing to try out this brand new platform), but once I made my profile on it I was instantly attracted to its sleek portfolio and multitude of other features.

After struggling to create my own portfolio and applying modifications a number of times I was convinced that it’s always gonna eat up my time to design and create a portfolio for my own (given that I’m a developer and weak-eyed at design). Nor is it easy to create portfolios that dynamically generates all your work across a dozen platforms like, Medium, Github, Dev.to or Hashnode.

This is why I’m planning to keep using Peerlist from now on and I’m actively sharing my peerlist profile as a resume links to recruiters. It’s all that a modern social network must have, to succeed.

Wait, did I mention it also enables you to add people to your private lists so you can keep track of whoever you’re connecting with? 🤩

This is all the more reason to love this platform even though it’s relatively new to the market! Despite making connections you can interact with them on a daily scrolls (which is a news feed like place) to help share information with others and also apply to Jobs, in the jobs section of it.

⚡ Things that could make it even more stand out

There’s always room to grow and we’re getting aware of new usecases every day, thus there could be some things that could always be improved and will get it to perfection! 🚀

One to one DMs

This could help get in touch more personally with your networks. Especially because most parts of networking is just communicating efficiently. This needs to work also so that people can share work with their peers and get that community factor going (also scrolls are already great at this).

Community building

As for the most part, a network is build of groups of people and groups of people are gathered by the voice of a community. It’ll be awesome to have that community factor where everyone is motivating one another. This can be like a private group which will have it’s own scroll content (posted by fellow members) or a group chat which allows everyone to catch up on one another.

Although this can’t be told as the primary necessity of a social network for professionals but, at the building of connections with great bunch of people can really be boosted by those.

💁🏻‍♂️ Bonus tips for efficient networking

Give more than you get

Always be giving. As said by one of famous influencers, Gary Vee, give more than you get. We sometimes get so focused on getting from others that we forget we also need to serve.

Ask good questions and be a good listener

Asking the well prepared questions can help you seek the right kind of information as well as a people need to know that you’re listening to what they’ve to say, else it’s a poor use of their time.

Keep in touch with your network

Networking is a group activity and a long project not an overnight homework that you complete by pulling in an all nighter. Firstly have patience, every good thing will take time to manifest and do follow up after a meetup is over or if you’ve connected with them long before.

🌅 Conclusion

As our elders said, “Rome was not built in a day”, there is no need to worry if you don’t have a half a thousand followers by tomorrow, it’s all about playing the infinite game. If you keep showing up everyday and work towards a common goal, people will notice and start supporting you in due time. Remember build relationships, not connections, it’ll change the way you measure success.

And with that enjoy your weekend everyone and keep building cool stuff!

Say hi to me on my Peerlist profile! 👋 Also if you’re interested in frontend development and more technical content, stay tuned at @heytulsiprasad on Twitter 🐦