Glad to see you here again, career-seekers! We bet you’re excited to read more on our series featuring the best ways to deal with all the other career-seekers out there.
One way to do that, which we’ll be discussing here, is to prepare for when they eventually become our allies instead of our enemies. How, you ask? Keep reading for the full scoop.
- TREAT THEM AS POTENTIAL CONNECTIONS AND PARTNERS.
Our competitors in the workforce are certainly professionals, like us. At one point or another, we would all be employed and undertaking our own tasks or projects. There may be some moving around involved, and some of us who’ve met before at the same interview appointment may jump to other companies before settling for a long-term employer.
We must always be open to the possibility that these companies we work for will intersect at some point, through official business or other ventures. When that happens and we find ourselves face to face with someone we’d treated harshly for being our competitor in the past, should we expect an easy time dealing with them as the relationship between companies is established?
Ideally, we should. We should be able to trust that our previous competitor would be professional enough to separate business from personal matters. But realistically, we can expect that there will be some level of dislike that will affect that person’s dealings with us. And while it’s true that such behavior is not very professional, we wouldn’t be able to claim that our treatment of them in the past was professional in the first place. If we analyze this, we would see that the other person’s unprofessional behavior now could have been avoided if we behaved professionally toward them in the past.
So what does that professional behavior involve? For one thing, at the very least we should respect our competitors as people and fellow professionals. Once we have that covered, we should work on finding common ground between us and other career-seekers. It should preferably be related to the chosen fields of all parties involved. Sharing our expertise and our goals would be an effective way to encourage other career-seekers to build ties with us.
If we think about it, putting in the effort to be professional today can save us a lot of unnecessary toiling to build relationships in the future. Therefore, the above approach to network-building presents the best possible balance of present effort and future rewards. And the best thing is, we could start as early as we possibly can.
Why not make that today?