If you choose to pursue an MBA, you will surely learn a lot. One of the most consistent lessons that you will learn from the first to the last day of your MBA is the power of networking. From classmates to professors, guest lecturers, alumni, and LinkedIn connections – your duty is to increase and utilize this network.
If you are in a city such as New York or Washington DC, networking is part of the culture. Not having a LinkedIn profile is unheard of, and it is expected of you to add someone on LinkedIn after meeting them. There are countless events created just for the purpose of networking. Companies even go so far as to incentivize employees to network by providing bonuses if they provide referrals for job openings.
If you are in the process of looking for a job, you should know that 70% of jobs are not published publicly on job sites. What is more, 85% of jobs are filled through networking. Your chances of getting hired are much higher if you invest your time on networking, rather than applying through job boards. Networking is not only crucial for job searches but also for building business relationships with clients, customers, partnerships, and vendors.
Coming from a different culture, I was suspicious of networking. As I discussed more and more with my peers, I discovered that I was not alone in holding this view. For people who come from developing countries, networking seems a lot like nepotism or cronyism. Getting a job at a particular company because you have a friend working there is frowned upon, not celebrated.
What the Americans were calling networking, we called nepotism.
The key difference between the two is the skillset of the candidate. While networking is a combination of who you know plus the skillset you possess, nepotism is just based on who you know without any weight placed on skills or credentials. That is why nepotism is frowned upon, while networking is encouraged.
No matter how skilled you are, networking is needed to get ahead. Professor Ron Burt from the University of Chicago has studied the networking behaviour [pdf] of managers in Asia, Europe, and North America. In doing so, he has discovered that a key distinguishing factor of the most successful 20% is networking. People with larger and more open networks than the rest, i.e. those who know many different clusters of people, perform better when measured by promotions, pay, and performance evaluations.
Figure: Achievement vs Network Constraint
A key predictor of career success is having an open network instead of a closed one. When you do not expand your network, your knowledge remains limited to a small group of people. If you are not constantly exposed to new ideas, job opportunities, and global trends, then you are stranded and lack the room for growth.
During my two year MBA, I gained a greater understanding of the power of networking, and what distinguishes networking from nepotism. Peers got job referrals from LinkedIn connections merely because they attended the same alma mater. Professors opened doors to third-party connections who needed consultants for their projects. Alumni who attended alumni roundtables hired for jobs that weren’t advertised on job boards. There were of course still people who managed to secure jobs by following the online application procedures, but these were relatively rare cases compared to those who used the power of networking.
To conclude, networking is the most powerful tool to get ahead. Although the famous proverb says, “It’s not what you know but who you know”, the reality is that your skills still play an important role in the equation as networking should be distinguished from nepotism. Your skills are necessary tools for playing the game. Your network is the trampoline that will give you the needed push to get into the game, and rise to the next level.
Tringa Krasniqi holds an MBA degree from The George Washington University. She is the founder and consultant at Ivy Journey, an educational consulting firm for gaining admission to universities and winning scholarships.
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