Ask HN: How would you educate students on professional networking?
A hard lesson I learned over time is that ignoring your network, or avoiding activities related to networking can have an insidious effect on your career.
After graduating I had no help or support of people to guide me on my start to my career. I thought I'd just have to hit the job boards solo whenever I wanted to find a new job and continue that cycle indefinitely that until I retire, as long as I keep a professional attitude at work. My work life and social life are incredibly isolated from each other. Turns out that neglecting social activities and not having building strong relationships at work is bad idea. Who knew?
I didn't, that's who.
The benefits to career relationships may sound like obvious material to a lot of people, but I graduated university not knowing a lot about what I needed to know. I didn't join clubs or fraternities, didn't consider them highly necessary. There were no appropriate internships for my major. I tried making friends in my classes but it was hard to find common ground with others, or classmates already formed hard cliques with others.
It's impossible to be prepared for every little thing when you're starting to go out into the real world and starting a career, but what can be done in schools to help reduce the ignorance about the facts of networking, and mitigate the damaging effects of this ignorance?
These mistakes have really hurt my employability. I would like to see less students, less graduates and less prospective professionals make the same mistakes I did.