Developing your networking skills to build a successful career in accounting
For accounting professionals who want to expand their client base and develop industry contacts, networking is a valuable tool. Accounting students can use both online and offline methods to improve their networking. For those who have little experience or are fresher, networking helps to provide opportunities.
Networking to land a job is one thing, moreover after landing your job networking helps to achieve many benefits when you maintain the connection over time.
How Do You Network To Get A Career In Accounting?
Different Types Of Professional Networking In Accounting
There mainly three types of networking in accounting
- Operational Networking : Operational networking focuses on matters internal to an individual or company, such as efficient management of current responsibilities. Operational networking encomapsses straightforward meeting of objectives. Excessive focus on internal matters crowds out more strategic questions.
- Personal Networking : Personal networking centres on enhancement of personal and professional development opportunities. It may seem less relevant to immediate concerns, personal networking provides access to important resources such as mentoring and coaching.
- Strategic Networking : Strategic networking emphasizes positioning your efforts appropriately with key contacts, thereby shaping your future in accounting. As an aspiring accounting professional, you can benefit from improving strategic networking skills to position yourself as an attractive candidate for hiring and promotion.
Networking Events In Accounting
Networking events play a vital job in accounting. It helps in career and professional development. Typical offerings include seminars, job fairs, mentoring fairs, open roundtable forums, lectures featuring experts to field questions, leadership summits, and social mixer events.
Elevator Pitches In Accounting
An elevator pitch should contain a concise, clear message about you, what you do, your career goals and how you might bring value to an employer.
Social Networking Sites For Accounting Professionals
There are many online networking and job searching platforms available.
SpotGiraffe is one of the best job portals for all accounting and finance jobs. Here you can connect with numerous organisations and employers.
Ways To Boost Your Networking Skills
Business networking skills can play a valuable role in finding a job or increasing your hiring potential. Here are some ways to improve your professional networking skills.
Building Relationships
Building strong interpersonal relationships over time with people is the key to business and successful job hunt. You want to be someone who is perceived to offer value, and a positive and useful connection to have so that you can improve your networks.
You need to be open, honest, and genuinely engaged in their causes to build a network of professional friends.
Keeping In Contact
Good networking skills are not gaining new contact on social media; networking is developing relationships over time that are mutually beneficial but may be able to aid you in job hunt or business venture either initially or in the future.
With the prevalence of social media, people are used to collecting social media friends as a form of networking, and people are more likely to disconnect. Prioritise efforts that develop strong long term relationships with important connections.
Leverage On Influential Connections
In networking, prioritising leads that are more likely to yield results is the key to success. This approach is a normal process in determining the people we should engage with, whether socially or professionally. Your goals determine the criteria used to determine influence. It all starts from knowing what you want to achieve, and then plotting the logical next steps from that point onwards.
Staying Positive
Most people give up easily when they don’t get the result quickly. But if you want to see the result, you need to invest time into business networking over an extended period of time.
Developing your business networking skills is a long term process that needs patience. By remaining positive, you will ensure that when you do finally meet someone that can help you, you will still be able to give both a great first impression, and also a strong reason why they should help you in your job hunt.
Improve Emailing Skills
Communication is one of the major parts in developing networking skills. You may need to communicate through emails. While social media has become an important part of our everyday lives, nothing beats well written email. Email is one of the dominant methods of communication in business.
Always keep your email short, easy to read, and focus mainly on the recipient. When emailing, it is always a good idea to do a little research into the recipient beforehand, and then tailor the email to mention shared contacts, interests or specific things they have done that have made an impression.
Work On Your Communication Skills
Good communication skills are the most important part in developing better networks. Communication helps to differentiate the successful individuals in the business.
People with incredible knowledge but lack the ability to communicate effectively will limit their career progression.
Focus On Your Efforts
Networking should be mutually beneficial. So that you are always adding value to others in your network, is to expect the same in return. If the connections always seem to ask for help without offering any value to themselves, it could be time to de-prioritise.
Job hunting is one of the hardest parts in life. With strong networking you can achieve your goals. Networking centred on sharing knowledge and resources that offer mutual benefits.
