I had the pleasure of speaking to Jonathan VanSchaack a senior Security Engineer at a non for profit. During the course of his career Jonathan has built several businesses from the ground up. Jonathan has been networking for over a decade to build these businesses and his network.

Jonathan identified several different methods of networking during a downturn. Start with looking at your personal network. Look at where you work currently, have worked in the past and know outside of your workplace. If you have a job currently and take one person from your workplace out to lunch every week for a year that’s 50 new people in your network that you didn’t know. Also it will really deepen the relationships that you have in your current workplace. Another option that you can have to network is to join after hour party’s with your workplace or other groups you are a member of. Conferences are a great option for you to attend as well because you can meet people you wouldn’t otherwise. Also you could travel and see something that you might not otherwise. This will be limited by your ability to network currently during the corona virus but you can get around this by buying your coworker lunch and have a zoom meeting to talk.

One of the big opportunities to be able to grow your network currently is through the use of technology. It’s hard to give someone corona virus through a zoom chat. Try using digital tools like Linkedin to start building a new relationship digitally. Also there are other websites like meetup that you can search for “local” networking events to be able to interact with people. Another option that you have at your fingertips is to reach out to classic networking groups like your local Chamber of Commerce and see what they have digitally.  You can also reach out to a few other things like discord groups, online forums, Facebook groups, etc.

There are some major drawbacks to networking digitally. The first major drawback is that you have to have the technology to be able to network digitally. If you don’t have a good internet connection, good audio set up and computer I would reconsider it. You want to make a good impact on someone when you are first meeting them. If this is your first time meeting someone then it’s important to make a good impression. The second drawback of networking digitally is that you cannot know the person as well as you would if you talked to them face to face.

One of the important things that you can do right now is focusing on maintaining your network. You can make sure that you are meeting all the needs oft the people in your network that may need you. One of the books that Jonathan mentioned was  Give and Take by Adam Grant PhD. If you focus on helping others during the time when they may need you it will really help your network in the long term. Everyone has had a time when they needed assistance with something and it can be extremely impactful for you to help them during this time. When networking  instead of focusing on growing a list of professional contacts grow relationships. It’s important to keep track with your network. Make a list of your contacts and then over the course of the year contact them at least once or more. If you don’t schedule the time then nothing will change.

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