How to Map your Network

I get that networking is important but I have no idea where to start? 

Most returners in this contemporary job market get the fact that networking is important. They realise that in this day and age, the majority of roles are filled directly from people’s networks and not from recruiters or adverts.  

But for many of you there may still be a mental block when it comes to approaching your network - or even recognising that you have a network! Particularly when you throw a career break into the mix, adding to the overall effect by magnifying fears and worries about who and how to use contacts to help. 

So let’s challenge some of the common assumptions that may be holding you back from thinking about how your network can help with your return to work.  

I don’t have a network anymore. 

I hear this a lot from women who have had a career break. In fact, we all have a network. It may be a different network than the one you had before your break, it may be a combination of old and new contacts and it might even be a better one than you had before! You might just not be thinking of it as a professional network or be assuming that those you spend time with now won’t have any useful professional contacts. 

I can’t ask people I know socially to help me with my job search. 

Would you help your friends if they asked you? We like helping other people. Remember you are not asking your friends for a job but simply for information or an introduction to someone in an area/organisation that interests you. It’s also a good way to begin practising your work story and re-engaging with the ‘professional’ you. A lot of leverage can come from a personal network, particularly after a career break. 

Remember “Six degrees of separation”? The trick with networking is tapping into your wider network – most opportunities come this way. This means multiplying your contacts and reach by accessing your network’s network. 

My current contacts won’t know anyone in my field of interest.

This is a common assumption, but you can't have total awareness of your network’s network. One returner's neighbour's brother turned out to be very senior in the sector she wanted to get into and was able to make an introduction. You don’t know who might know who ..

We often meet women who have known potentially-helpful contacts for years but yet never had a conversation about their professional selves. You could be sitting on dynamite contacts right in front of your nose!

How to Map your Network

Mapping your network helps you to think about who you know and to prioritise who to approach.

1. Create some quiet space and time to brainstorm different areas of your life in which you have contacts who might be able to help you. Be creative and think broadly!
2. Consider contacts in Past and Present, together with ideas on new contacts you could develop in the Future. Here are some groupings to get you started (adapted from the excellent book Back on the Career Track):
1. Past: School, university, professional training, work (colleagues, clients, suppliers, alumni groups)
2. Present: Family, friends, neighbours, sports, hobbies, volunteer contacts, religious and community contacts, professional bodies, school network  
3. Future: Create local alumni network or job search group, volunteer, join an association
3. Include all the people you know in each group. Make a rule not to rule people out. Remember to keep an open mind and approach it with curiosity – wouldn’t it be interesting to find out who people might know? Use LinkedIn to find people from your past and enlist others to remind you of people you may have forgotten about. 
4. Map it out in a way that works for you – it might be a spider diagram, post-it notes on a large piece of paper or a spreadsheet. 
5. Prioritise your 1st level contacts - those you will approach first - by creating relevant criteria such as: “Do they have relevant sector/function/technical knowledge?” “Do I think they will know a lot of other people who could help?” “Do I feel comfortable contacting this person early on?”   
6. Then map out 2^nd and 3^rd level contacts – those you will approach later. John Lees' book Just the Job is helpful in explaining how to work out different levels of contacts. 

I've mapped my network. What now?

1. Your primary goal is to use your network to make useful new contacts. Approach your 1st level contacts - tell them what type of work you're looking for, relating it to your interests, skills and experience before and during your break. Ask them if they know of anyone who might be able to offer you advice or to provide information on your area(s) of interest, and if they would be happy to make an introduction.
2. With each new person you meet, ask at the end of the conversation if they could introduce you to anyone else who would be interesting to speak to.
3. Create a system for tracking your progress and adding to the network as you expand your list of contacts. A spreadsheet works well at this point.  
4. Reward your progress – it’s better to approach several useful contacts per week than to spend hours researching on the internet with no focus. Every time you set up a call, arrange a coffee or gain a new introduction reward yourself in some sort of way that’s meaningful for you – it will take time and effort but will be of great long-term benefit not only for your first role back but in terms of your ongoing career opportunities! 

Posted by Kate Mansfield, Lead Career Coach, Women Returners

Building a Portfolio Career

Do you want to develop a portfolio career after your career break? Are you not quite sure whether you'd be suited to it?  Our guest blogger, Ally Maughan of People Puzzles can help.

‘Portfolio career’ is a phrase that is gaining traction and popularity, but it's meaning is often still a little murky. Defined as having several part-time jobs at once, rather than one full time role, it has the potential to be very flexible, varied and immensely satisfying. So why aren’t more people doing it?

At People Puzzles we have built our business on hiring HR Directors who have left a busy, often national or international corporate role, who want to work in a different way, whether that is to facilitate more time with the family, a better work-life balance, or is the start of a journey into retirement. We help our team to develop portfolios of clients, typically working with between six and 10 different companies, working with each between three and six days per month.

That means we spend a lot of time thinking about who is best suited to a portfolio career, how can we help people succeed, what are the challenges, and how do we find brilliant people who can quickly adapt to a different life.

Start with the why.

We always start with why someone wants to build a portfolio career. It certainly is not the easy option: imagine trying to find five jobs at the same time instead of just one! Recruiters don’t typically work in this market, your CV is usually designed for a corporate role, and you are often offering services to people who don’t have a budget, don’t know they need what you have to offer, or have never heard of someone working in a portfolio way.

That is why the why is so important. You have to be absolutely committed to this way of working. To knowing you value flexibility, usually over income in the short term, and sometimes in the short term. You often don’t get a benefits package, paid holiday or sick leave. What you can get is lucrative work, full flexibility, more availability in school holidays, and such a variety of work that no two days are the same.

Here are five top things we think you will need to be successful:

1.     Aptitude
Not every personality type or behavioural approach is suited to portfolio working. There is a lot of juggling, switching attention between your different roles and responsibilities, which are usually in different locations meaning every day is in a different place. How do you react when there is a problem at one of your clients? Can you quickly prioritise, act and problem solve? How do you manage working for three or more different bosses without going quietly mad?

Portfolio working can often work best when you have expert skills to offer, you can keep the roles you have long term, and you can quickly build and maintain relationships in each role. Seriously consider if this describes you and the way you approach work, otherwise a permanent full or part time job may well suit you better.

2.     Energy & enthusiasm
Building a portfolio is a time consuming business. If finding one job normally takes a couple of months at a senior level, finding three, or even up to 10 can take a year. You will need to be overflowing with energy, enthusiasm and optimism to build your portfolio. This will also help you land opportunities as, in our experience, people buy a smiling, positive person over a glass half empty kind of person.

3.     Your proposition
What is it that you are really selling? Who will buy it? How much will you charge? Having left a career as an employee, moving into selling your services in a different way can take some careful thought, development and testing (there is a reason there are so many Focus Groups on The Apprentice!). As People Puzzles has grown, we have had the luxury of spending a bit of money on senior marketing people. They have helped us to develop what we sell, who buys it, why they buy it, what problems we really solve, and why clients would buy from us not from someone else. Think about what makes you different, what value you deliver and what problems you solve. Buyers typically want problems to be solved rather than pie in the sky dreams to be fulfilled. Take a day out and really hammer this out if you are going it alone.

4.     Routes to market
Any good marketing strategy covers how your buyers will find you. If you are starting a portfolio career the easiest and cheapest way to get started will be to go and join someone else’s business that is already offering this. Of course you will have to share in the fees, but this is often very cost effective when you consider the costs of a website, blogs, networking, setting up a sales function etc.

If you are committed to trying it on your own, think about what partnerships you will need, how you will meet your clients, what events to attend, and whether digital marketing is going to deliver you good opportunities. If you have a lump sum, you can always buy a franchise, but remember you will still need to do most of the sales work yourself. 

5.     A network
Without a doubt, being established as an expert in a network is of crucial importance to quickly growing a portfolio. And that network needs to be relevant to the services you are offering right now. If you are well known in corporate circles, can you sell back in to that market? We estimate it takes 1-2 years to build a network in the SME market, so build that into your plans for getting busy.

It may seem a daunting challenge, but for those that persevere, portfolio working can be an extremely rewarding and flexible career choice. When it doesn’t work, our advice is to go and find something else that you enjoy and that is easier to maintain. However, if you really understand what you are selling, and have the contacts to maintain a steady stream of opportunities, it can be a way of working that you maintain over decades. 


Ally Maughan, Founder and CEO of People Puzzles, provider of portfolio HR Directors. People Puzzles is part of The Liberti Group, a global provider of high calibre part-time professionals with opportunities for portfolio FDs, Marketing Directors, IT Directors, Financial Controllers and Finance Managers.

Just do it! Taking action to bring back your confidence

Regular readers of our monthly newsletter will be aware that, Julianne and I have presented or joined panels at a large and varied number of events on getting back to work after a long career break. At one of these, a CFA Women's Network panel, I was asked for ideas on how to build confidence, a very natural question. In my coaching work, this is often an area where returners wish to focus and I have also run dedicated workshops and written advice columns about it many times. As I have so much to say on this topic, I initially wondered how I could do it justice in a short answer. Ultimately I responded simply with a single effective method for improving confidence ... just get on and do stuff!

I can illustrate this idea best with my own experience of speaking at all these events in the past months. I've always believed that public speaking doesn't come naturally to me and so I haven't actively sought speaking and presenting opportunities. In fact, prior to 2015, I've given maybe 6 or 7 public presentations in total through my whole career. However, since the profile that we have generated for Women Returners has led to multiple speaking invitations, I've had plenty of chances to gain experience.

As is normal when doing new things, the first few times didn't go smoothly at all: I made many 'rookie' mistakes and felt what confidence I had at the start was draining away. Although I would have found it easy to decide that it was all too difficult and uncomfortable and decline to do more, I didn't have that option because I had already committed to more events. So, I had to persevere, learning from my earlier errors and gradually developing an approach to public speaking which works for me. Each time I've presented or participated I've learned something new and as I've gained experience, I've learned to take the positives from it, rather than focus on the bits that aren't perfect. 

Over time I've noticed that I can stop my voice from wobbling and my heart from racing, that I know my topic and don't need copious notes and that I can pause and take a drink without losing my connection with my audience. Through doing this - keeping taking action, while focusing on what has gone well - I've experienced a noticeable increase in my confidence at speaking. Even though it still doesn't feel natural to me, I no longer dread it. Indeed I find myself looking forward to opportunities to test out my new skill!

When returners ask about how to improve their confidence, I will ask them what it is they would like to feel more confident about: we all have areas of our lives where we feel confident as well as areas where we don't. Two areas where returners commonly tell me they feel low in confidence are re-establishing a professional network and going to interviews. Based on my experience of building confidence through taking action, these are some ideas for actions I recommend:

Re-establishing your network

• Draw up a list of all the possible people you could get in touch with, including people from your past, your present and those you'd like to meet in the future
• Starting with those who you find easiest to approach, set yourself a target of a number of calls to make, or emails to write, on a weekly basis. 
• Ask friendly former colleagues if you can meet for a coffee to talk about industry or sector developments
• Join LinkedIn groups in your professional field and initiate, or comment on, discussions
• Volunteer at or attend relevant conferences or professional network meetings with the initial goal of speaking to just one or two people
• Reward yourself for meeting your targets, identify what went well with your approach so you can repeat it - and increase your targets as your confidence builds

Interviews

• Performing well at interviews requires preparation
• Ask family, friends and even former colleagues to support you by giving you practice at answering interview-type questions. Ask them for feedback on both what you do well as well as ways to improve
• Take every opportunity for interviews as a place to practice your technique: even if you are not interested in the role, you can gain valuable experience from the interview itself

In whichever area you are hoping to re-build your confidence you will find that regular and repeated action will pay off.

Posted by Katerina - co-founder of Women Returners