Welcome to Expert Viewpoints: Building Your Network. In this video, experts will discuss how to build a network of contacts. Go on Twitter. Find the people, the leaders, the people who are interested in that particular topic and who are established in that career field, and they talk about this topic. Start following them, start liking their tweets start replying. Inject yourself in conversation, ask questions, join certain groups. Go on Stack Overflow in similar communities. Try to join local meet ups. Go online and try to find some forums or Discord or Slack communities specific to a topic. LinkedIn is also a great resource if you find a certain people are valuable when it comes to sharing their expertise and mentorship on particular topics, follow them, maybe message them. Don't ignore providing help as well to others. Maybe there are some people might be even more junior than you and they will ask questions and you can be there to assist as well. Building a professional network is really important. May not be something we've done before but if you've got a LinkedIn profile you've already started to do it. Really simple, follow the guides on LinkedIn to get an all-star profile. Fill in all the sections, put in your key skills, ask recommendations, put in projects that you've worked on and also try and make it interesting to look at. So, if there's any videos, links, obviously that aren't going to get you in trouble for sharing add them to your profile. It's really important to build a big network. It can really help when it comes to job seeking. So, my advice is, connect with recruiters, connect with previous colleagues, connect with managers. Start building a network of people that are right and relevant to you. A quick tip when doing this. When you're sending invites to people put a few words in there, personalize invites just feel a whole lot more personal than just the generic LinkedIn message that gets spammed out to too many people nowadays. The main way somebody could actually network the contacts is through actually creating a LinkedIn profile. I would say a LinkedIn profile is one of the best ways to get, to get to know people and also have connections to LinkedIn because recruiters look at this net, LinkedIn as an opportunity to attract, to get new qualified, employ candidates for the positions of data science specifically. So doing that. For that maybe creating a LinkedIn profile and then working with there's a networking section there probably you can create, like you could ask people for references and also give references out for people. I mean, asking people, references is very important, so they can respond and say what you have done there and what, what you have done from an experienced standpoint and how, how that would actually make the recruiter look at your profile more carefully and make sure that you're aligned for the position they're trying to recruit. But also, that you could be joining other meeting opportunities around what's called meetups and there are other, organizations and conferences you could go to. And some other conferences like working with Gartner and going see whether you could go to those conferences, you get to meet more people and network there too. So attending a lot of conferences along with you know, get together, attend, professional, get togethers locally are very important for networking. So those are some other things I would or think about doing from a standpoint of people knowing you and understanding your profile, so that you'll be more marketable in your data science jobs. So meetups is a good idea, um, hackathons, but for, let's say more professional contacts, it's maybe meetups, but I also did, I just randomly ping people on LinkedIn and ask for coffee. So, it sometimes works, but maybe you have to send 10 to 20 requests out to get one or uh, 2 responses or replies, but I had some coffees with some data scientists in larger companies, so that's always good. Maker spaces, hacking labs, all that stuff is interesting. Just go out where those people meet conferences and so on and just be open and ask questions and then hunt them down on LinkedIn and maybe invite them to a coffee. I would say as a job seeker, networking by going to events, especially in person, whether it's conferences, meetups, just group wide events, networking events. Those are all really good to understand who is in your network, who can you tap into in your network to really run ideas by, understand what they do. You never know if someone, you may, you may need them now, or five years from now. I built relationships by going out to different events and diversifying the events that I went to so that I could understand different industries as well. Some of the other ways to do this online, I would say definitely getting on Twitter, finding meetup groups, I use GroupMe and LinkedIn as well to meet people. Talk about what I do. Talk about what I'll enjoy doing, share resources and people will come to you as well.