Everyone has a network, small or large even if we don’t realise it. This may be: researchers, academics, supervisors, professional support staff, previous colleagues, people from conferences and special interest groups, social contacts.
Networking, although not always a comfortable activity can be productive and useful for researchers and lead to new opportunities.
Networking can:
Lead to job opportunities and career development and more senior posts.
Enable collaboration with other researchers.
Develop long term productive working relationships.
Lead to conference presentations, projects or cooperation on journal articles.
Vitae has a useful website on Networking.
http://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers/1385/Networking.html
Everyone has a network, small or large even if we don’t realise it. This may be: researchers, academics, supervisors, professional support staff, previous colleagues, people from conferences and special interest groups, social contacts.
Developing your networks
Networking is a reciprocal activity and you never know when a contact may be valuable or when you might be able to help someone else. Go to seminars, meetings and conferences, join groups such as professional bodies, staff associations and networks. You could also explore ways of networking online.
I recently attended a postgraduate open evening for a course at City. I met really nice people there, especially some of the former students and it is great to share ideas such as networking and social events. Don’t confine your networking to the workplace, especially if you are keen to explore other career avenues. The point of having a network is that your contacts have other contacts so you can be introduced to or collaborate with them. See the Scoop It site developed by 2 of my colleagues.