The relationships you establish at the start of your career will only benefit you as your career develops. This means lawyers and accountants need to start building a professional network as soon as they possible can.
If you wait until you are a partner or director in your firm, business development will be more difficult when you eventually decide to get involved (and you will have to get involved because promotion is inextricably linked to being able to generate work) as your peers will have already built their own relationships with the professionals you want to target.
To make building a professional network a little easier and get your conversations with your network up and running, here are 5 tips that will help you start to build your very own – albeit junior – professional network:
1 Introduce the people you meet from other professions to your friends, colleagues and contacts
2 Spend some time with your colleagues as they too will be able to refer you work in the future (especially if they move to another firm)
3 Share market intel like research, reports or articles from the trade and local press you feel may be of interest to them
4 Offer support to people unhappy at work or between jobs and think who you could introduce them to so they can continue to develop their careers
5 If you get an opportunity for a secondment or placement, take it. You will learn loads and grow your network at the same time … working in the shipyards in Barrow in Furness was the making of me!
If you’d like to discuss how we can help you with building a professional network with our networking training (or any other BD training) session for you, email us and we can find a time to chat.