Career aspect: Networking & visibility- Restless patience in career journeys series

Building upon the article I published in January 2022 titled Be restlessly patient & take control of your career journey, and based on the feedback and interest I received on the topic, I've initiated a series of follow-on articles to extend details on the different career aspects I've introduced in the first article. The aim is to make the career aspects as clear as possible; providing pointers and examples where applicable, in order to make them actionable, allowing you to plan and track the different activities against them easily going forward.

In this article I'll introduce the Networking & visibility career aspect. In my first article titled Be restlessly patient & take control of your career journey, I've briefly introduced this aspect as follows:

How well is your profile and work visible; locally within your organization, globally within your organization or externally within the wider technical community. As well as the strength of your network, with people you can significantly impact or could be your advocates or references when required.

To further clarify what this aspect is all about, visibility as noted above, is about your profile and your work being widely known, recognized, attested and celebrated by your network along the different tiers. You'd first be well known to your immediate/local circles, such as within your in-country department or business, internally within your organization. Then the circle expands, one level out, across countries, within your region, maybe still within your business unit, internally within your organization. Then you'd be recognized globally, across geographies within your organization and also externally, outside your own organization. You are free to define the circles how it makes most sense to your line of work. One important point to note though, is that you need a rounded 360 degrees network, on all levels; so aside from the tiers we discussed, you also need to have people who are ahead of you, or higher in ranks, as well as peers of equal stature, in addition to people you are ahead of in your career, such as mentees and people you lead/manage.?

I personally like to think of visibility along the lines of nested circles representing your network. There are different levels of which your network/reach expands, and your visibility just shines through and reaches outer bounds. As you expand your network, so does your visibility expand. This is why I'm combining visibility with networking as part of the same career aspect.

The following diagram is a simple means for you to visualize and track your network across the different tiers, you can keep adding names of people to it and moving them around as you, and/or they, change in classification; horizontally as you/they progress in ranks and/or along the inner/outward circles as you/they change affiliations.

It may seem straight forward reading it on-screen, but it is actually one of the career aspects, in which you need to put in a lot of effort, and it would build over longer periods of time than most other aspects. It also requires constant assessment and revisiting for mapping people in your network in the correct tiers.

Moving next into how to engage in this career aspect, I'll present this by a set of tips to consider:

• Regularly and constantly assess the strength of your network to know how well you are doing, and put your plan accordingly.
• Target certain people you believe will be strong allies for you in the future and look for opportunities and activities you can engage with them on, during which you can demonstrate your work and caliber to help them form the positive notion of your profile.
• Take on opportunities to mentor others, and make an impact on the future generations and your peers.
• Do community outreach activities such as with schools, universities, research centers, etc..?
• Take on special initiatives whether internal in your organization or external with bodies and entities relevant to your domain.
• Take on project assignments with high profile clients, and get to interact with people in higher positions on-the-job.
• Take time to network in events and conferences, and look for opportunities for collaboration with people from different organizations and countries.
• Note that networking in this context of professional career development is different than merely socialization of befriending people, so don't confuse both.

As to why it's important, your network are your allies and advocates throughout your career with different matters and at different stages. Can be as simple as requesting a connection's expertise on a subject, to more intensive activities such as requesting letters of recommendations, referrals or locating your next career opportunity. So it may well support the Opportunities to excel career aspect. Additionally, the wider and stronger the network you have, it helps you greatly in asserting your Domain of expertise (technical eminence); you've basically already established your leadership to your network and they in turn relay this to their networks directly in one-on-one personal interactions or indirectly, such as on social media (boosting the Social eminence career aspect) or other mass referral forums.

With that, it should be clearer now what the Networking & visibility career aspect is all about, how you can engage in it, and why it's important for your career.

This concludes the fifth article in the Restless patience in career journeys series - more to come as I unfurl the rest of the aspects, so stay tuned.