Chevening Essay - Networking Skills to make positive impact

Chevening is looking for individuals with strong networking skills, who will engage with the Chevening community and influence and lead others in their chosen profession. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your networking skills, and outline how you hope to use these skills in the future.(Minimum word count: 100 words, maximum word count: 500 words)

ESSAY

communication supports personal growth

In my opinion, each communication is an opportunity for personal growth. In particular, this was justified by my experience of two year living in Lahore, Pakistan. Because of my field job, I often had to visit client sites multiple times in order to get requirements and to conduct trainings of client's staff. Thus, I know what challenges arises in communicating new people. However, every time I moved I kept increasing my networking connections.

I had a great opportunity to show my networking skills during the IT Club seminars of welcoming and training new people during my studies. The sessions were held by department six years ago. I was introvert from young age and I needed to improve my speaking skills, so it was not easy to speak in public and in new environment. For this, I have done an online course of Public Relations from National University of Singapore. As a result of this course, I established a good networking with people attending these events. Moreover, I also got first position in Semester Presentations and received an offer from Oracle Pakistan as a Technical Account Manager, but unfortunately I could not accept this offer as I was doing my last semester. However, I still keep in touch with them and believe that sometimes I can be helpful for them.

While studying, I started helping my classmates who were weak in basic computer science skills like programming fundamentals. For this, I had arranged multiple workshops to deliver technical lectures. I participated in post-production support of my university information system where I showed all the experience and communicative skills to improve the system performance. As a result of this performance, my university then referred me to a multi-national company which was the top leading automation company where I took part in implementation of an automation system for the highest court of the state. Thanks to this job, where I got International exposure by taking part in implementation of automated justice systems for UAE and Qatar governments. This exposure gave me a chance to communicate foreigners in business meetings.

My personal goals and career strategy motivated the strong professional network relevance. As a Chevening awardee I would have a possibility to collaborate with the best Computer and engineering scientists in UK and work on high international level. I plan to cooperate with foreign scholars to present our insights on different cultural prospective integration and learning UK culture with its century traditions and history. I want to be a part of young enthusiastic leaders from different nations to bring solutions for world crisis.

Alee, this essay is tremendously confusing. There are only a series of events that depict how you got recommended to certain position, there is no indication of how you created and developed your networking skills for the benefit of your current job. That is the main objective of this essay, to prove that you are capable of creating and maintaining applicable networking skills in the fulfillment of your professional duties. In order to prove that you are capable of developing and maintaining a network that can be of use to you during your time as a Chevening scholar, in your capacity as a graduate of the scholarship program and the university, and also, as a future mentor to incoming Chevening scholars and previous scholars. That is why you are asked to explain how you develop and maintain your network of professional contacts.

The networking skills that you present in this essay are all beneficial to you since you are recommended for studies and jobs by other people. So that shows that you are respected as a peer, but not that you have an active network that can be useful to you in the future. You need to prove that you can create a professional contact or already have existing contacts within your line of work. Consider your work opportunities at Oracle and that other company. Were there opportunities when you found yourself facing a problem at the office when you required the assistance of other people from other departments or outside contacts? How did you meet these people and what did you have to do to create that contact point? Do those contact points still exist today? Do you think you can call upon them to help you or other scholars in the future? Think of how you can use these contacts to advance your career in the future and use that to highlight how you can use the same skills in the future.