How to Network (while exiting the military during a pandemic)

Congratulations! You’ve decided to move into the private sector after years of active duty military service. As a way of saying “a job well done,” the world just served up a special dish for you — a pandemic!

Now what?

As much as we’d love to lean on the military’s transition programs like T-GPS and TAP, these programs only provide basic knowledge and are not targeted enough to add value in an individual career search.

Even for the basics like…

• building a resume & LinkedIn account
• how to find & apply for the right jobs, or
• how to properly interview,

the military’s in-house programs struggle to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of the digital job market.

Oh, and that was before the pandemic accelerated that change!

The purpose of this article is to address one of the most important aspects of a career search: networking — and getting straight-to-the-point here, I’ll be focusing on three specific concepts: what networking is, who to network with, and how to network in our current climate (pandemic era). Towards the end of the article, I’ve made an example of how to network with LinkedIn.