Don't lose your contacts when you lose your job.
Keeping your professional network contacts when you leave your job is always a challenge, and it is even more complicated now that most of us are networking through social media. It used to be that everyone kept their contacts in a rolodex, but now, things are a lot more complicated.
When you are looking for a job, your professional network can be the best tool, but how do you keep that data when you change jobs?
Here are 5 tips to help you keep your contacts:
- Check you corporate policy- Each company has a different policy regarding intellectual property, electronic communications and internet usage. Find out if your company considers anything you do, theirs. Surprisingly, many companies have tough policies. In order to get around this, keep an address book or a file box to store business cards.
- Set up new profiles- Just because you have worked at a specific company for a long time doesn't mean that you always will. It's a good idea to have personal accounts on all of your social networking sites. This makes it easy to have contacts that are clearly yours.
- Keep your email separate- I'm always surprised at the number of people who use their work email address for everything. It's really a bad idea to do this. Set up an email address with Gmail or another free email provider and only use your work email for work. Otherwise, if you change jobs, you'll lose your contact list and any archived message
Always keep in mind that having access to your data and your contacts is crucial to your overall career success. If you leave it all with your company, you'll have trouble rebuilding the information. It's better to keep things separate and avoid the problem.
What do you do to protect your networking information? Please share your thoughts and tips in the comments.
By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer for Administrativejobsblog and Nexxt. Along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
Become a member to take advantage of more features, like commenting and voting.
Register or sign in today!