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It's interesting  to think about which career practitioners are the best trainers/teachers of networking. What I'm finding is that those that are comfortable and effective at networking don't necessarily make the best networking teachers. The reason, most effective networkers are intuitively good...meaning they just do it and don't really think about the process. In most cases it's about providing contacts...you should go and meet so and so. This of course is beneficial, if the client connects, but in most cases, at least from what our preliminary research results are indicating, is that those individuals typically don't connect. Therefore, understanding the networking process is key if you want to teach effective networking.

The key to teaching networking is not to give them contacts but to show individuals how to tap into their own networks. Giving them the contact (or the fish) helps them in the short term, but actually may impede their ability to connect with new folks in the future. Teaching them to network (or fish) is a way of ensuring that they are not only able to connect in the short term, but will able to do it again when they need to.After all, networking is a 21st century skill and we all need to become more proficient at it.

With many of the funded employment program it's tempting to give them contacts, after all it's a numbers game. However, this may increase recidivism in that they will not know how to do it on their own and when the time comes to access the hidden job market, they won't know how to. The key is to get job seekers to practice identifying contacts and then connecting. That's not to say that you can not provide contacts, I'm just saying that the main effort should come from the job seeker.

When working with job seekers, their networking activity should in fact be more active then how many jobs they apply to. In addition to, how many jobs did they apply to, we should also be asking how many connections have they made? After all, when you give them some fish, they're fed for a day, when you teach them how to catch fish, you're feeding them for a life time. The same holds true for networking.

JP