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WHAT IS NETWORKING?

“The action or process of interacting with others to exchange information and develop professional or social contacts.”

Oxford Languages

Networking is an essential part in helping you establish a career, and this idea is especially important for the games industry and other creative fields. Networking will help you connect with professionals above and below your experience level, provide advice for your future, and let you get in touch with hiring processors.

While I won’t be delving into it too deeply, discord can also be an amazing way to network as can game jams. We’re going to talk about the benefits of these more in different articles, so stay tuned!

WHAT NETWORKING IS NOT

Networking does not mean if you cold call enough people on LinkedIn you will be hired. As Amir Satvat has stated before (but paraphrased), networking should be about connecting with peers and meeting new colleagues and friends in the industry, and this may end up blossoming into connection opportunities.

This is important. Ultimately, you should be networking to meet people in your field, not to get you a job. And I’ll explain a bit further: network beyond your exact field and obtain so many more learning opportunities. If you only send connection requests to 2D artists when you’re a 2D artist that’s fine, but you have the ability to learn from and connect with so many more people when you broaden that to simply “people in games”.

THE DREADED CONNECTION REQUEST

Requesting to connect to strangers is difficult. You’ll likely be doing the majority of this on LinkedIn, and there if you don’t have a premium account you’ll be limited to a certain number of personalized connection requests each month. I would recommend following these steps:

  • If new, get your 1 month free of LinkedIn Premium
  • Send personalized message requests (more on that later) to people
  • If you don’t have personalized requests, commenting on a post to signal you’ve sent a connection request in response to a post is often better than a cold call
  • When all else fails, cold connect!

PERSONALIZED CONNECTION REQUESTS

Connection requests are accompanied by a small blurb of words that you can add to your invitation to connect on LinkedIn. You should be including some key things, including:

  1. Your name and how/if you directly know the person
  2. What you do
  3. Why you want to connect

You have a limited amount of words, so be sure to keep it short and sweet. The person receiving the request will also see only the start of the message and the title you choose, so make sure it gets your point across!

Like I said in our LinkedIn setup page, make sure your profile includes a very short inclusion of what you do so people can see at an immediate glance:

CONNECTING IN-PERSON

Connecting in-person can be done in a million different ways. Most commonly are small community gaming events and game conferences. During conferences, bringing a business card is amazing as it will include all your information, and you can ask for the other persons’!

The most important thing is being your authentic self. Don’t talk to people to get hired. Talk to people because you like games. Even if you’re nervous, it is critical to attempt to reach out, as otherwise new folks in the industry are likely to not know anyone in particular at events and thus vice versa.

Be nice, have fun, and enjoy your community!