Making Contact and Making Your Contacts Work For You

Networking is a word that fills many researchers with dread, evoking unpleasant images of oily self-promoters or painfully stilted small-talk. But there is a vital link between who knows you, whom you know, and being successful. There is even evidence that somewhere between 70 and 90 per cent of jobs go to candidates who are in some way known to their employer prior to the recruitment process.

Networking or, simply, making contact with other people is not just for the garrulous or the extrovert; it is a powerful skill that anyone can learn and practise. This bite-size workshop is designed to help unpick some of our assumptions about what’s involved in networking, to learn some simple strategies for doing it, and to try some of these out.

All Schools PhD Students & Postdocs/Research Staff

Note for Postdocs/Research Staff:

• Any member of research staff who can demonstrate that their primary responsibility is to conduct research and that they are employed for this purpose
• It does not matter whether the University or some other body is formally their employer, e.g. a University Partner Institute or a College

Number of sessions: 1

• Jenny Wade loves working with people to improve their transferable skills. She worked for a multinational retail bank for 11 years and has run her own training company since 2006. She delivers training to postgraduates and managers in corporate companies

This workshop has been designed around the fact that the career trajectories of Cambridge researchers are numerous and diverse and those who achieve success have allocated time and energy to building their own ‘self-leadership’ capabilities. Self-leadership is defined as a pro-active and strategic approach to getting the most out of yourself and those with whom you interact in your everyday working lives.

For more details, please email Researcher Development

One session of two hours