So, I was doing some continuing education in FEES this past weekend. (Finding fun in sticking a small camera up your colleagues’ noses for two days.  Not sure what that says about me as a person.) It was a mix of speech-language pathologists working across of variety of (mostly) medical settings.

Nerd that I am, I liked to hear what it was like for each of them working across different settings. (Especially those working in long-term care facilities with trachs and vents! I mean, PEOPLE EATING AND SPEAKING ON VENTS???  I had an entire class on trachs and vents and my mind still  boggles.)

Anyway, in reflecting on the interesting information I had gathered about various clinicians’ job settings, I suddenly had a questions.

Q: Did I just miss an opportunity to network?

A: Yes.

Not necessarily in the job crawling sense (although if I were looking for a job, it would have been a good place to do it), but rather in a, Let Me Make Contact With People Who Know More About Certain Stuff Than I Do. Maybe the opportunity for me to do that was not particularly obvious to me because I already work with a good group of clinicians with whom I can ask questions. But that’s not true for everyone! And it’s also not true that everyone I work with happens to be an expert/have a lot of knowledge in a particular area that I have questions in. Not to mention if there comes a time in my life where I am looking for a new job. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some contacts in my back pocket?

The question is, how do I make that leap from chatting about my/their job/s to, “So can I call you sometime.” “Can I have your email address in case I ever have questions about X?”

Of course, not all of these SLPs were doing work that related to my current interests and activities in my own job (see also: people talking on vents.) But it got me thinking about future workshops or conferences I attend. Guess networking falls under one of my Top Goals of All Time: Being Assertive.

Does anyone else have thoughts on networking? Do you use it? How do you make (and keep) contacts? What do you use it for or have you used it for? How do you work exchanging contact information into the conversation?  Or is that last question an obvious sign that I am insecure and un-assertive? Guess I have a lot of work to do.

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