A Great Way to Network Posted on January 14, 2008 Jeannette R. Ickovics (bio) talks about how consulting and serving on Advisory Panels offers an invaluable networking opportunity.

Being a consultant or a participant on National Advisory Boards is a great way to network and to create national and international reputation. There are occasions early in your career where somebody might take you under their wing and bring you to an important meeting at NIH or CDC or the Institute of Medicine, but typically one has to earn that place at the table. And I think that comes back to this issue of niche-building and really becoming an expert. Deepen whatever your field is so that ideally you’re invited to consult on those topics.

It is a place where there are other leaders. It comes back also to this issue of networking and mentoring. So these big National Advisory Panels can be a very, very important place to meet the leaders in your field. They’re the people who you may have opportunity to collaborate with in terms of writing papers or conducting future studies. They’re also people who may write letters of support for you as you come up for promotion. So those Advisory Panels are very, very important.

To the extent that you’re asked to be on a National Advisory Board, it’s a great way to network and to meet people in a very targeted area, in your targeted area. And I think that, think carefully about when and where to do those, and those are places where again you can go back to your mentor, to your department chair to say “Would this be valued in terms of my career development?” and making those decisions that way.

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