When Li attended an annual business-club gala as a first-year student at the City University of New York’s Hunter College, she “had no clue what to say to anyone. I was too scared to go up to groups.” Two years later, after internships, conferences, clubs, classes, and regular coaching and guidance through Hunter’s Cooperman Business Center, Li is “definitely more comfortable.” For building her networking confidence, she credits the center’s director, Naomi Press, and its programs manager, Elise Harris. “They’ve been huge supports throughout my college journey,” says Li. “I honestly don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t have them guiding me through all this.”
The importance of networking to Li’s college experience is emblematic. Both college students and non-college participants in apprenticeship, certification, licensing, and other work-force trainee programs stressed how essential networking was in recent online focus groups organized by The Chronicle and Langer Research Associates, with support from the Ascendium Education Group. In addition, 70 percent of respondents to a 2023 Chronicle survey said colleges help students build a personal or professional network. Colleges emphasize those benefits in trying to persuade a skeptical public that students reap a substantial return on their tuition investment. An uncertain economy, a tight labor market, and employers’ new expectations for entry-level AI skills only compound the need for intensified career planning and networking in undergraduate and alumni programs.
Jacqueline Grant, a career and work force-development expert, says that “networking is no longer optional. It is the currency of career success.”
For this article, The Chronicle spoke to more than 30 people about college students’ professional networking — students, college administrators, career coaches, recruiters, higher-ed analysts, corporate executives, and recent alumni — and heard from an equal number in written answers to queries. Here’s the overall picture they paint:
- Students increasingly need and expect advice, opportunities, and practice in professional networking, but they often aren’t sure where to begin and they frequently start too late.
- Students generally understand that networking — early and consistently — is necessary for entering a turbulent job market that requires versatility, upskilling, and durable people skills alongside technical ones. But students sometimes fail to grasp that the onus is on them, not the college, and that while career-services offices, faculty, and alumni can help, students themselves have to take the initiative.
- Colleges are scrambling to develop students’ networking skills, often starting at first-year orientation or even before, but they face budget constraints, difficulty in scaling up their programs, lousy entry-level job prospects for new graduates, and sometimes unrealistic expectations and post-pandemic social anxiety among Gen Z cohorts.
- AI complicates networking. But when used well, it can help even the playing field for first-gen and low-income students matching skills to career tracks, fine-tuning résumés and cover letters, and preparing for interviews. Moreover, employers expect AI skills from recent graduates and put a premium on advanced AI skills.
Effective networking programs are difficult to create, but when they click, they ignite students’ careers. Hunter College’s Li, 20, is a computer-science major who is also in the business-certificate program, and she’s minoring in statistics and Asian American studies. She wants to go into tech product management. Her Cooperman fellowship subsidizes her tuition and internship funding as well as expenses like a new laptop. Networking helped her get a scholarship to go to San Diego for a 2024 Tapia Conference for diversity in computing. There she met an admissions director for Break Through Tech, a Cornell Tech program to develop traditionally overlooked tech talent. That director encouraged Li to apply to a Break Through Tech AI and machine-learning fellowship. Li did so and was accepted. She’s also had internships at Girls Who Code, Girlstart, Cornell Tech, and LinkedIn.
For all that, Li says she’s “so stressed about getting a 2026 internship” and the ever-sought invitation to work for that employer post-graduation. In that sense, she says, “I’m essentially applying for a full-time job right now.” A recent second-place finish and seed funding for a new app she co-developed for the CUNY Clash startup competition should, however, give Li yet another boost. The app, called naomi, features a skills-building program to help students learn — guess what? — how to build résumés, network, and find internships.
A Wretched Entry-Level Job Market
In this economy, students seeking their first jobs need all the help they can get. A generation ago, a college graduate might get an entry-level job without significant prior work experience. No longer. “The internship has become the entry-level job,” says Amanda Augustine, a career expert with TopResume. “If you don’t have practical experience, it puts you at a disadvantage.” (TopResume is a partner of Chronicle Careers.)
However, getting that internship is tougher than it has been in decades. Sam Wright, head of operations and partnerships for Huntr, an AI-powered résumé builder and job-search management platform, cites Federal Reserve data that shows that the current climate for entry-level job seekers is the worst since 1988. Economists say that contributing to the tight labor market over all, and especially the difficult entry-level market, are tariff uncertainty, inflation, and AI’s gnawing at lower-rung positions particularly.
Students, especially older students nearing graduation, “are definitely scared,” says Stephanie Gallo, director of career planning for the John Charles Meditz College of Arts & Sciences at Fairfield University. “I think more so this year than ever before. … Parents are even more worried.” Huntr’s Wright has advised more than 100 college career-services departments and job-training programs, and his overall message to them reflects the industry consensus: Students should customize every search and application. Career-services experts say that the majority of jobs are filled through referrals.
In short: Networking is more important than ever.
“Something that technology will never be able to replace is the personalized, warm introduction,” says Christine Cruzvergara, chief education strategy officer at Handshake, a major entry-level career platform used by more than 1,500 colleges.
Ben Wildavsky, author of The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials and Connections and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says it was the sociologist Mark Granovetter who, in 1973, famously explored “the strength of weak ties.” Close networks tend to have the same professional knowledge, so they don’t necessarily share a wider circle of job possibilities. But loose networks — friends of friends, colleagues of colleagues — expand one’s professional reach. Subsequent studies have repeatedly reaffirmed Granovetter’s findings. “Degrees and skills are necessary but not sufficient,” says Wildavsky. “Networks are a vital piece of the puzzle.”
That may sound counterintuitive in the age of AI-honed résumé keywords that students hope they can send out into the cyberworld like digital homing pigeons to efficiently retrieve the perfect position. The problem is everyone thinks that, so companies routinely receive several hundred fairly identical applications for each of the dwindling number of job openings. Those AI-driven job-search pigeons hit the AI-driven Applicant Tracking System fan, and the result is an ugly, fruitless billowing of digital feathers. While AI can help students figure out who and what they are within the labor market, experts say, they must not let AI rob them of their voice and their authenticity. “You need to become a person, not a faceless applicant, in this job pool,” says Gallo of Fairfield University.
Encouraging Students to Network
Does the word networking bring to mind sniveling or pathetic sucking up or smarmily working a room with a creepy smile plastered on your face? Rachel Toor gets that. “If you’re like me, the idea of ‘networking’ might seem kind of, well, slimy,” writes Toor, a professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, in her 2024 book, Why You, Why Me, Why Now: The Mindset and Moves to Land That First Job, from Networking to Cover Letters, Resumes, and Interviews. “But here’s what I find appealing: it’s an opportunity to snoop. As a writer, I often say I’m professionally nosy. … If you were a Marine in Iraq or delivered pizzas or competed in barrel racing, I’ll probably ask you about that. Most people are happy to talk about themselves if you express a genuine interest, and they often welcome a chance to reflect on how they got from there to here.”
If that feels uncomfortable to students, advise them that it’s like any other skill — a muscle they need to develop.
In other words, ABN — Always Be Networking — like Ethan Moody, a Marine veteran who in 2024 earned his master’s degree in product management from Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. He follows Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s principle of embracing asymmetric opportunities, “where the potential upside far outweighs the downside,” Moody says. Wondering if an hour or two at that career meetup or a potentially cringey reunion is worthwhile? Consider:
Moody, 30, had gone to Penn State as an undergrad, and at an alumni event, he made a connection that led him to a Pittsburgh-area product-management meetup where he met another contact, Nathan Mancine, a CMU business-school capstone adviser. Mancine connected Moody with Brad Eiben, executive director of the CMU master’s program in product management, and Eiben encouraged Moody to apply. While at CMU, Moody was also introduced by Mancine to a hiring manager at Sheetz, who gave Moody a key internship. Before CMU, Moody had worked at a startup but got laid off when the company hit turbulence. That had been a bitter pill, but Moody maintained his relationship with that boss, who, upon Moody’s graduation from the CMU master’s program, hired him for a private-equity advisory firm called SteelBridge Consulting. Then there’s Moody’s own company, a skateboard retailer called Palindrome that he started with an artist and longtime friend.
You get the idea. Moody is married with two young children. He could have understandably skipped the Penn State alumni event and the product-management meetup. But he didn’t, and they turned out to be a well-spent few hours. However, it has to go both ways. You must give as well as take, Moody says — “Who can you benefit from meeting and who can benefit from meeting you? Having something to offer is important too.”
Of course, not everyone has the confidence and networking chops of Moody, who as a Marine infantry officer led 42 men in support of an ally-rescue operation in Afghanistan, working with other platoon commanders in motor transport, radio communications, logistics, and intelligence.
But networking, and gaining comfort with it, take many forms.
Katey Lloyd, 19, is a 2024 graduate of the Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics’ Hagerstown, Md., branch campus. She was home-schooled in a single-parent household after her father died of esophageal cancer when she was 8. But career networking wasn’t a big stretch after more than a decade of door-to-door religious discussions as a Jehovah’s Witness. “Ministry helped a lot,” she says — getting “comfortable knocking on people’s doors to see if they’ll talk about the bible with me.” At PIA, she expanded on those people skills, giving campus tours, participating in student government, representing the institute at career events, and attending discussions on networking etiquette and self-presentation before meeting with potential employers at a job fair. Ministry is still important to Lloyd, but so is the company she recently founded, Katey Did Aviation. That advances her freelance work while letting her maintain control of her schedule. She splits her time between Maryland and Florida and helps maintain aircraft for the disaster-relief organization Volunteer Pilot Group.
She likes school and will probably go back for further certifications — for instance, for avionics work and her inspector’s authorization. Her advice to other students? “I would say to go for it and just stick firm to what you want your end goal to be.”
Overcoming Networking Jitters
For some shy, introverted, socially awkward, or neurodiverse students, networking can be a special kind of hell. Colleges, and in many cases employers, are attuned to that, and help is at hand.
Maureen Crawford Hentz is vice president for human resources at A.W. Chesterton Company, an industrial-equipment supplier, but she also teaches a graduate course on talent acquisition and performance management at Merrimack College and formerly directed career services at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. She was terrified of networking and public speaking, she says. And while students are routinely advised to seek out informational interviews, especially with alumni of their college, many alumni dread those conversations because they are unfocused, students often aren’t prepared, and the chats usually end in a clumsy, overreach job ask. So Hentz created a concise, handy guide for students and others called “Anatomy of a Meet & Greet,” breaking down a 25-minute informational interview into four sections — opening, interviewee’s biography, conversation, and closing — with those four sections further divided into 17 total components. For instance, in the conversation section: “How did you decide to come here?” and “What do you most enjoy about your work?”
Amanda Graham is a TV and film writer, author, podcast host, and speaker in Bolton, England, who learned only as an adult that she was on the autism spectrum, which retrospectively explained why, as she puts it, “I have always sucked at networking.” In 2020, when no one wanted to teach a course in employability at the University of Bolton, she was enlisted, taking it as an opportunity to learn, and teach, from her mistakes, creating a curriculum on networking, CV writing, interview techniques, pitching yourself and your ideas, and other career skills. She rewrote, updated, and taught the course for several years and has since adapted elements of it for various writing, production, and other professional groups. She emphasizes strategies for those on the spectrum, who have attention-deficit conditions, or who navigate other neurodivergent conditions. For instance: when to focus on another person’s interests, history, and when to introduce yours into the discussion; if glad-handing isn’t your thing, how to concentrate on deepening 10 or 12 relationships over a year; or what facial expressions are appropriate and welcoming in a professional-networking situation.
Systemic Problems
While the challenges for neurodivergent students may be more acute, issues of anxiety and social-skills deficits can hamper networking opportunities for many on campus. Echoing comments by her counterparts at other colleges, Sandra Arana, director of the Center for Career and Professional Development at Whittier College, says, “I’m seeing there’s definitely a difference in communications and interpersonal skills.” Current college students came up in the era of post-9/11 Homeland Security, the Great Recession, smartphones, social media, and the pandemic. Their mental-health statistics remain worrisome.
In career preparation and readiness, students often seem unmotivated, inert, say college career personnel. Too often, says John F. Clarke, dean of DePauw University’s School of Business and Leadership, students “assume the system will take care of it — but career success cannot be left to chance. Students need to own their professional development from the outset, ideally beginning before they even arrive on campus.”
Sometimes, students from lower- or middle-income backgrounds just don’t understand how crucial networking is, says Nitzan Pelman, founder of Climb Together, a nonprofit that aims to help students attain social capital for economic mobility. Wealthy families, the kind who aim for admission to Harvard Business School as much for the networking as for the education, imbue kids in that mind-set from the start, she says.
In some cases, says Jane Swift, the former governor of Massachusetts and now chief executive of Education at Work, students don’t embrace career-readiness programs because they simply can’t. They are scrambling already with part-time jobs, may be food or housing insecure, and don’t have time or energy to polish academic and pre-professional credentials. Education at Work helps first-generation and low-income students at Arizona State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, and elsewhere overcome networking gaps by hiring those students into part-time roles in paid, flexible, work-based learning experiences at major companies like Fidelity and Intuit. That way, the jobs those students require for income are also positions that will set them up for impressive careers. Education at Work has helped more than 9,300 students earn more than $106 million in wages and obtain $13 million in tuition assistance. As admirable as that is, it’s a drop in the bucket, Swift says, because the need is gargantuan, particular given current entry-level job trends. “Recent college graduates have never faced this type of hiring disruption and it is an unprecedented crisis.”
The problem is systemic, says Ryan Craig, managing director at Achieve Partners, which invests in tech, health-care, and education businesses, and author of Apprentice Nation: How the ‘Earn and Learn’ Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America. As a nation, America has vastly underinvested in work-based and earn-and-learn career-launch infrastructure, and colleges alone can’t make up for that, says Craig. According to a 2024 study from the Business Higher Education Forum, some 8.2 million undergraduates want paid internships but there are only 3.6 million internships available, and only 2.5 million of those are considered quality internships. That is, for every student who wants and gets an internship, two don’t.
Colleges can help mitigate that problem, he says, through professionally centered capstone projects and micro-internships (say, over a brief winter term), and by seeking to transform inherently inequitable internships into systematic co-op programs. Colleges can also take a more productive approach to on-campus employment. “Universities are not helpless,” Craig says. “They are large employers themselves.” With on-campus vendors, and retail and other employers near campus, colleges, employers, and students themselves can turn fairly rote positions into more-learningful ones. For example, a student working at a coffee shop might push to learn more about supply-chain management and opt to help with that.
Plus, those on-campus employment experiences can help build real-world connections that are now the coin of the realm in the job market. Says Ben Wildavsky, the Career Arts author, students have to start early and be creative to build a list of references. “You need people who can vouch for you. You need people who have seen you in action.”
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