Career development: enhancing your networking skills

Can you walk into a room full of strangers and chat easily, get to know people, and let them get to know you? Networking is not just a job search strategy; it is a critical professional career development enrichment strategy that can help you build your knowledge and expertise. When you need help, do you have a network of available people or do you know how to develop a network to assist you? Networking sounds easy and we tend to think it should come naturally. However, networking is a learned skill that just about everyone struggles with at some time or another (1). This article provides a how- to network process, summarized in Table 1, that will enhance your career development.