Is it really more important “who you know” than “what you know”?
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Sofia Tram Le, Class of 2012
Networking is now considered one of the keys to success. Many people say that in order to reach your target, it’s more important “who you know” than “what you know”. I thought the same thing, but the course Understanding and Leveraging Networks that I’m taking at MSC changed my mind. In fact, everything needs to start with “what you know”
I use to think that networking is playing with your luck. It happens for you to meet someone important, and just so you have that key connection. Yes, that might be true in the past, the generation of my parents, when the network’s value of someone was related to life experience. Now, network is a science. The researchers are now able to say how many steps each person are separated from a stranger. Only 6 handshakes. We can do survey to analyze and figure out what is good and what is bad about our network. With a right understanding of networks and a good strategy, we can build up the network that we need to reach our target. Our professor of this course proves herself as an example. She told us that she dreamed to work in Europe since she was a little girl. She started to build the network that could support her dream since college, and now, traveling back and forth to Europe is a part of her job.
The knowledge from this class is really useful for me in my job search because it helps me reanalyze my strategy when networking and come up with a better one. Additionally, it supports me significantly in the managing-knowledge process for Kraft Food as a class project for the other class. Yesterday we did a networking practice called Change Pro in class and this activity proved to me once again that sometimes you do not have any “who you know” at all but with “what you know”, which are the good strategy and tactic, you could even control your time to reach the target. I really appreciate that MSC bought the license for us to use Change Pro in our course. My sister is now jealous with me because she was not in the Networks class so she could not experience a such interesting activity.
Categorised as: Sofia Le