sept06minutes

To kick off the 06-07 school year, we had our 2006 FMHRA President, Sherry Olson talk about the importance of networking in the business world. Networking is who you know and more importantly, who knows you!

She mentioned two reasons to network: to gain or share expertise or information and to increase exposure for the company. In networking it’s important to remember people’s names as well as learn about them, their home life, work life, hobbies, schooling, etc. and be sincerely, genuinely interested. Messages are conveyed by body language (55%), voice (38%), and words (7%), so pay attention to your actions.

As an activity to help us with networking, we teamed up with someone we didn’t know and went through the steps of asking them about themselves. This was a great way for everyone to practice networking.

One way for students to network is to participate in FMHRA activities. Ways to participate are through their annual scholarship, attending HR games, helping earn the merit award, networking with HR professionals, attending HR presentations and meetings, job shadowing, internships, and mentoring.

She finished the meeting with tips of networking: be friendly, think of your yourself as a product, have a positive attitude and strong sense of confidence, display courage and desire to establish new connections, become genuinely interested in other people, discipline yourself to think proactively about info you seek, follow up on comments made, be a good listener, make the other person feel important and do it sincerely, remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

Thank you Sherry for your words of wisdom!!

Our next meeting will be held Tuesday, October 3, 2006. A panel of business professionals will be answering questions on negotiating salaries. Keep an eye out for more information on this event.