Celebrating A Connection A Day!!!

My LinkedIn journey began on January 9, 2007, and today, 5,341 days later, I hit the 5,000 connections milestone - not exactly a connection a day but close. I made the decision to get on this platform after my family and I visited a few cities across Canada to determine where we would want to live. Vancouver won our hearts and I realized the need to start networking with folks here while leveraging my contacts from the various organizations I worked at and education institutions I attended.

So what changed when I hit this milestone - nothing! Yes, you read that right, nothing changed and there was no confetti on my profile to celebrate. What did change however was that this milestone helped me to reflect on my journey here and what this means for me and my network going forward.

My life this far has been a series of journeys from city-to-city, then country-to-country and eventually continent-to-continent - 16 cities, 4 countries and 3 continents to be specific. This helped me grow connections through my school, college, university, work and social networks. Bringing them together here laid the foundation and probably accounted for the first 1,000 or so connections. From that point on, I hit a plateau and wondered how to grow.

Then came the power of networking when I started to connect with people that I met at events, meetings, business settings, etc. whom I thought I could benefit from knowing professionally. This probably added a few hundred more and continues to be a source of new connections. Limitations are when people don't have a LinkedIn profile themselves or they are not active or worse - they aren't interested in connecting with me!

What probably has been the most effective way of growing my network has been getting active on the platform. Without being active, my profile here would've just been a stale online rolodex of contacts that I did not foster. Getting active could start with liking or commenting on posts people share, wishing people for their significant anniversaries or change in positions or education accomplishments, re-sharing posts that means something to us, curating your own content, writing blog posts such as this one or sharing our own professional milestones. Video is a whole new avenue that I haven't yet explored but will consider.

To everyone one of my connections here, thank you for being a part of my journey and contributing in some way big or small in my professional development. The size of my connections does not change me or elevate me in anyway, it just helps me learn more as I progress along this professional networking journey and along the way, I hope to give something back as well. Happy Networking!!!