If I could offer you just one tip for your professional future, networking would be it.

When it comes to finding a job networking is invaluable. It’s best to network throughout your academic and early professional career. Waiting to network until you’ve been laid off from you first professional job is far less effective than say…networking the entire time you were at that job and the entire time you were in college.

What does it take to network?

A little bit of shamelessness. There’s not need to worry about the shamelessness though. Someone has to initiate the awkward discussion about how you and the individual you are attempting to network with may be able to help each other out in the present or in the future. Put on your big girl pants and talk to strangers!

Social networking sites for professionals such as linked in and visual cv are excellent resources, but you can’t replace face to face contact. I am so comfortable stalking people from behind the computer monitor and finding friends of friends who work for my dream companies. Putting on that business suit and walking into a room filled with professionals (who are also strangers) is so much more intimidating. (Can you believe I would rather admit to someone via email that I stalked them via facebook, before talking to a potential employer at a convention?)

The next month (or at least until I find a job, which I’m hoping is sooner than a month from now) will be filled with UCF Alumni resume building workshops, career fairs and miscellaneous networking events.

The moral of the story is be nice to your professors, peers and other professionals that you meet while you’re in college and maybe you’ll have to speak to fewer stranger. (Or maybe you’ll just know so many people and be so comfortable with networking that no one will be a stranger in your eyes.)

Happy Networking!