Why do we need a new approach to networking?
Here's the background to my workshop at The University of Manchester SEA Centre on 17th August 2026.
How finding a new job has changed
A capable professional can now find a vacancy, analyse the job description, research the organisation and tailor an application before lunch. So can hundreds of other capable professionals. The tools have become faster, the applications more polished and the formal employment market easier to enter. Yet many experienced people feel less visible than before.
That apparent contradiction tells us something important about networking in the age of AI. Technology has reduced the effort required to enter a selection process, while allowing employers to process, compare and filter far more interest. Both sides have become more efficient. Efficiency, however, is not the same as recognition.
By the time a vacancy is advertised, the organisation has usually translated a complicated business need into a job specification. The candidate then has to translate a complicated career into the language of that specification. AI can help with this translation, sometimes very effectively, but the encounter is already taking place inside somebody else’s categories. The role exists, the criteria have been framed and the crowd has assembled.
Networking offers a different route into the employment market. Its value lies in allowing professional recognition to begin earlier, while needs are still being interpreted, opportunities are still taking shape and both parties can exchange information richer than a CV and a job description can carry. This is neither a way for well-connected people to evade proper selection nor a reason to treat every conversation as a hidden job interview.
The strategic question is therefore changing. It is no longer only, “Can I survive the selection process?” It is also, “Can I become known before the process begins?”
The formal market is only part of the market
Most job-search activity starts with an existing vacancy. There is a role, a specification and a closing date, followed by screening, shortlisting and, eventually, human conversation. This route is visible and accessible, which is precisely why it attracts so much attention. It also encourages the comforting belief that the market consists mainly of advertised jobs waiting to be matched with suitably qualified people.
The relationship route starts further upstream. It begins with immersion in a market: conversations about what is changing, where organisations are struggling, which capabilities are becoming valuable and which problems have not yet acquired a job title. Recognition develops through repeated exposure. Relevance becomes clearer. Introductions and opportunities may follow, but they are consequences of understanding and credibility rather than the opening demand.
This matters particularly during career transition. People changing sector, function or level are often strongest in precisely the areas least visible to a screening system. Their value may lie in judgement accumulated across contexts, in the ability to calm a politically difficult program, or in seeing a pattern that specialists inside one industry take for granted. Those qualities are real, but they do not always map neatly onto the keywords of a role they have never held.
Relationships can carry context that formal applications discard. A person can explain why experience from one industry travels to another, ask a question before making a claim and discover that a problem described one way in their current organisation has a different name elsewhere. This is one reason relatively loose professional connections can be so useful: they connect us to information, assumptions and possibilities that our closest colleagues may not possess. Familiar networks often confirm the career world we already know; broader networks expose us to worlds in which our experience may mean something different.
Yet capable professionals frequently avoid this route. Some dislike the implied transaction. Others do not want to appear needy, particularly when their current status has been built on being the person who provides answers. Seniority makes certain forms of networking harder because it raises the identity cost of being a beginner. Applying online can feel frustrating, but it is private; entering an unfamiliar professional community makes our uncertainty visible.
The usual networking question makes this worse: “Who do I know who can help me?” It turns a relationship into a request before there is enough shared understanding to support one. A better opening is curiosity about the other person’s world: what is becoming harder, what is receiving more attention, what keeps failing despite serious effort, and where the organisation is still trying to make sense of the problem. That conversation may lead nowhere immediate. It still produces something an application rarely does: better knowledge of the market and of how your experience is understood within it.
A job title tells people where to file you
When someone asks what we do, most of us respond with a role. “I am a product manager.” “I work in finance.” “I lead transformation.” The answer is accurate and socially efficient. It also gives the other person remarkably little to work with.
Job titles are organisational shorthand. They indicate where a person sits, but not necessarily what they are trusted to do. One product manager builds new products; another repairs adoption problems; a third reconciles customer demands with technical constraints; a fourth gets several powerful stakeholders to make a decision they have successfully avoided for six months. The shared title hides the difference that matters.
This becomes more consequential as careers cross organisational boundaries. Inside your employer, colleagues may understand the scale, ambiguity and political difficulty concealed by your title. Outside it, the title has to compete with hundreds of people using the same description, often for quite different work. The longer we remain in one organisation, the easier it is to mistake internal recognition for external legibility.
The problems I solve
A more useful starting point is to move from “What am I?” towards “What problems am I useful for?” This shifts the career story from organisational location to market value. It asks who tends to rely on you, what becomes difficult before you become involved and what changes because you are there.
The distinction sounds small, but it can produce a very different introduction. “I help organisations manage change” is broad enough to be true and too broad to create much recognition. “I help organisations make change stick when the strategy is agreed but old habits, incentives and ways of working keep pulling people backwards” gives the listener a situation they may recognise. It contains a problem, an outcome and some jeopardy. Something important is stuck.
Jeopardy matters because generic competence is rarely memorable. People lean in when they recognise a costly delay, a fragmented decision, a misunderstood risk, a politically difficult relationship or an outcome that everybody supports but nobody quite owns. Useful language recovers the real difficulty that vague professional language has quietly removed; it does not need to manufacture drama.
There is a trap here. A “problems I solve” statement can become another piece of personal-brand theatre: polished alone, memorised carefully and delivered regardless of the person in front of us. If it sounds as though it belongs on the side of a bus, it probably needs another conversation.
Treat the first version as a hypothesis to be tested in conversation. Say it to people who understand the world you want to enter and notice what happens. Do they ask a real question, supply an example from their organisation or say, “We have exactly that problem”? Do they look puzzled, nod politely or move the conversation towards safer ground? Their responses provide information about relevance, clarity and credibility, rather than a judgement on your worth.
For someone in transition, that information is unusually valuable. You may discover that the achievement you considered most impressive is less interesting to the new market than a capability you regarded as incidental. You may find that the language which establishes expertise in your current profession makes you sound remote in another. You may also learn that what you hoped was a portable strength depends more heavily on your present title, team or organisational platform than you realised.
Those discoveries are evidence about what will and will not travel, which is considerably more useful than reassurance that the first version of your story was already right.
Professional identity is built in conversation
Networking is identity work
This is where networking becomes more than a route to opportunities. It becomes part of the identity work of career change. We do not always think our way into a new professional identity and then present the finished version to the world. More often, we develop it through provisional claims, other people’s responses, small experiments and repeated contact with an unfamiliar professional community.
That process can feel uncomfortable because a job title does more than describe work. It carries status, belonging, accumulated credibility and a coherent story about the choices that brought us here. Moving from “I am a director of…” to “I am useful when…” may feel like surrendering something solid for something less certain. It asks us to separate our capability from the organisational identity that has housed it.
The deeper gain is a more portable understanding of your career capital. When you know the problems for which people repeatedly trust you, you can begin to see adjacent roles, sectors and forms of work that a title-based search would miss. You also become better able to distinguish genuine transferability from wishful thinking because the market is responding to your claim while it is still cheap to revise.
This is why effective networking is adaptive without being inauthentic. You do not need to recite the same sentence to everyone in order to remain honest. Different conversations bring different parts of your experience into relevance. The underlying capability remains true, while the emphasis changes because you are listening as well as speaking.
What you may take away from our workshop
AI can help you research a market, identify organisations, prepare for conversations and express your experience more clearly. Used well, it can make the work of networking more informed and less wasteful. What it cannot do on your behalf is create the mutual experience through which another person comes to understand your judgement, trust your interest and remember what you may be useful for.
The formal route will remain important. Vacancies still need applications, organisations still need evidence and relationships are no substitute for capability. But relying exclusively on advertised opportunities means entering the market at its most crowded point, after the need has been defined and the criteria have hardened.
Networking begins earlier. It helps you become known before the vacancy, credible before the interview and relevant before the shortlist. In an employment market increasingly efficient at processing candidates, that human recognition is not an alternative to merit. It is often how the meaning of your merit becomes visible.
So the useful question is not how many people are in your network. It is whether the people in the professional world you hope to enter can understand, remember and repeat the problems you are equipped to solve.