Professional networking can be hard. I think it’s even harder when you are getting started and don’t know anyone at all. If you’re an introvert like me, networking can feel like a mystery at times. There are things like meetups out there that demystify things a bit though. I am grateful that I stumbled into going to meetups and for everything I have gotten from them.
About 8 years ago I went to my first meetup, I found it on Meetup.com and ended up going to a random building to meet some random people. This put me into some local entrepreneurial tech and startup circles. I really built up a decent network having had attended a lot of meetups. I got some jobs from these meetups. I made a lot of friends from these meetups. They really helped jumpstart my career a little bit. In a lot of ways it was pretty easy too. I just had to show up.
That is the cool thing about a lot of professional meetups, you just have to show up. That makes networking and getting started networking very easy. This is what I needed at the time. I ended up having a bit of a tech career just because of the people I met in these meetups. I’m grateful these kind of events exist and how welcoming they are.