Polywork 🤹 Day 20 - Networking Advent Calendar
Polywork 🤹 Day 20 - Networking Advent Calendar
The Networking Advent Calendar is a 24-day long training program to build your networking muscles (and your network)! Not sure why you should do this? Missed Day 1? Read more here.
Day 20: Create a profile on Polywork
As LinkedIn’s becoming the new Facebook, more and more professional networks are popping up to offer alternatives. Polywork is one that I particularly enjoy. They raised $3.5 million earlier this year to build a more fun and meaningful professional network.
Polywork believes that our professional profile is more than just our full-time job title. It’s also our side gigs, podcasts, videos, blogs, speaking engagements and volunteering experiences. Polywork lets you showcase all these cool things you’re doing alongside your full-time job, and connect with others to help each other with their careers.
I find Polywork’s connection feature much more purpose-driven than LinkedIn, and not having a clear reason or goal to connect is often why LinkedIn or Xing are harder to network on. Once you set up your Polywork profile, you can go to Space Station and explore interesting people by the opportunities they’re open to or the “badges” (job titles, skills, past experiences) they have.
One small downside: Polywork is invite-only, so you need a VIP code to sign up. Although no company would be dumb enough to block their users, so you can follow their Twitter account which releases VIP codes on a regular basis (find some codes dropped on Dec 20, 2021). You can also try Googling to see if anyone’s giving out codes. While you wait for VIP codes, you can also check out these other professional communities to join.
Are these networking exercises helpful? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!