GoKawiilInformational interviews should provide a networking opportunity for both parties.Credit: SeventyFour/iStock via Getty
Informational interviews are informal opportunities to share or seek information. These chats can cover all sorts of topics, from switching disciplines or moving countries to potential job openings and collaborations. Most importantly, they are the mechanism that makes networking — the building of mutually beneficial working relationships — so powerful.
When you chat to someone who could later become your supervisor, employer or collaborator, you gain insights into what is driving the field and which pain points exist. As the other party shares challenges that they’ve encountered, you can articulate how your expertise, skills and knowledge might help them to overcome these roadblocks.
What’s invaluable about these conversations is that they also provide a full, multidimensional picture of your personality and what it’s like to work with you that cannot be articulated through social-media profiles and job applications. After all, as the conversation unfolds, both of you are demonstrating how you identify and solve problems, your collegiality and, perhaps most interestingly, the chemistry that you have with one another.
Once that connection is established, it creates a trust and a bond, and the other person might even come to see you as someone who can add value to their work or team. Although an informational interview is usually a privilege that someone has granted you to provide insight into a career path, the best interviewers will do what they can to make it a two-way networking opportunity, during which your positivity and collaborative nature can be experienced at first hand. The ultimate goal is for you both to find new career and research opportunities that can be explored together, now or in the future.
You might feel awkward and weird when you begin engaging in these chats but, as I tell my career-coaching clients, and explain in my book Create Your Unicorn Career, the more informational interviews you do, the less uncomfortable they will feel — and the better you will get at building meaningful relationships.
How to land an informational interview
Before you can talk to a leader, you first have to identify who you want to talk to. You might do this by reviewing the membership directory of a professional society, as well as its board of directors, committee chairs and staff lists. Similarly, conference apps and programmes allow you to pick out speakers, poster presenters, exhibitors and attendees. Publications can be used to identify authors, as well as people who are quoted or cited. Unsurprisingly, social media, especially LinkedIn, is another useful tool.
Training: Networking for researchers
I call any channel that brings like-minded parties together a networking node. These nodes provide a long list of people with whom you can network, as well as high-quality leads, such as people with whom you have something in common.
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