This is a YouTube video titled "5 Tips to effective networking in the real world" recorded in November 2020. The content features Mike Richards delivering a talk or presentation focused on practical advice for professional networking, including the importance of elevator pitches, engaging meaningfully with contacts, following up after events, and continuous self-development to advance one's career.
These are the things to do in the real world. It's all very lovely, LinkedIn, but it's not the real world. If the lights go out, it's not going to work. So what's the first thing you can do? Come to sessions like this. Come to Windy City Summit. Educate yourselves, improve yourselves. Put the things that you've learned onto your profile potentially. But then when you're here, you meet people and you have to have a thing called an elevator pitch. Hands up. Anyone knows an elevator pitch? Good. The majority don't. Brilliant. Otherwise, if you all put it up, I was like, right, we'll move on because there's beers here soon. Right, elevator pitch. In the time it takes you to come down from, say, the 20th floor to the first floor, you need to be able to summarize exactly who you are and what you do and make it interesting. That's the key bit. Sometimes you can also do it where you stand on one leg for the period of time that you can stand on one leg. I can do it quite a long time actually. But, you know, that's because I like my elevator pitch. But it's basically so global treasury recruiter recruits across the world. So it might be, you know, one of you guys. Senior treasurer, global multinational for XYZ Corporation. And my latest achievements are this. We've implemented this system within this time period and saved my company 200 million. Wow. That's going to make an oppression and make people want to talk to you. Listen, when you're at this conference, there's a temptation. Someone hands you a card, you start to talk to them, listen to what they've got to say. It's actually quite tiring. There's only one more day of their conference. But when you are engaging with people, actually engage and listen to what they're doing. Because it's only by doing that and making those real world connections, you're actually going to think, oh, hang on, three weeks time, someone says, oh, we're looking at doing this. Or do you know anyone that's done? Actually, there was that guy I met 3 weeks ago or that girl. So follow up with everyone, you're going to meet a lot of people here. Don't let the business cards sit on your desk and gather dust. Why? Well, if you randomly email them in five weeks time, I should get round to that. They. Oh, we met and we spoke about this thing at this conference too. They were like, who? Yeah, ignore. If you want to build a professional network that's going to help you, it's going to be a value to you and also to them. Then mention what you did. You know, I followed up with a lot of the people we met last night, saying, great to meet you at this. Would love to connect with you in the future, if it's appropriate. Develop yourself. Bit like one of the travelators at the airport that you see. Anyone that's flown in. If you are standing still and not developing yourself and just getting on and doing your job, you're actually going backwards. You need to constantly develop and keep going if you're going to go up your career path. Develop yourselves and everything else.
