To be in the right place at the right time, you’ll need to build your professional network. The cold, hard reality of the modern job market is that it is less about what you know and more about who you know. With so many skilled employees seeking jobs at any given moment, the network you have built is what will sustain you over the long haul.

In many instances, a person who makes the hiring decisions for a certain position does not care about what your grade point average was in college or what your extracurricular activities. They do not care about what you like to do in your spare time (within reason) and they do not care about your greatest fears or weaknesses.

They are looking for someone that they do not mind spending their days with. At most jobs, the people you work with become a makeshift family of sorts and we often end up spending more of our time with our coworkers than we do our own loved ones.

When you build a strong professional network of people who know who you are and what you are capable of, this allows you to bounce from city to city or even from career to career with relative ease. The good old days of getting a job straight out of college and spending your entire professional life working towards moving up in that particular company are falling by the wayside.

In the modern job market, versatility is prized and having a Rolodex full of contacts to call in a variety of different concentrations gives you a massive leg up on the competition.

Without a top notch professional network, you can easily end up working at the same dead end job for years and years, even if you are highly skilled and have the ability to do more. Lack of a network suggests to employers that you are someone who is unable to play nice with others and in most cases, they will look elsewhere and hire someone with more connections.

That is why it is important to build connections with other like-minded individuals and build bridges, instead of burning them. Until human beings learn to walk on water, the bridges that you build will typically serve as your pathway to professional success. Choose your connections wisely and nurture your network in any way that you can.

In closing, one of the very best ways I found to build your professional network is by checking out he website Meetup.com. There are typically events going on every day. And if you happen to be located in the San Antonio, Texas area you can always check out my Meetup: San Antonio Mastermind.