Networking: Making Connections for Growth with Andrea Macek

Action's Antidotes

Networking is the art of building connections and fostering relationships with individuals who can provide support, guidance, and opportunities. It involves cultivating a diverse network of mentors, peers, and protégés to learn from their experiences and expand one's perspective. But how can we effectively leverage our networks to maximize personal and professional growth? In this week's episode, we're joined by Andrea Macek, the Founder and CEO of AYM Consulting, to talk about what networking is and how to do it correctly. Andrea shares valuable insights on how to cultivate a strong network that can help you grow both personally and professionally. She enumerates the three types of people you should have in your network and some proven networking strategies. Tune in and learn practical tips for building a strong and supportive network. --- Listen to the podcast here: Networking: Making Connections for Growth with Andrea Macek Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In the last episode, we talked about my friend Keith developing a whole new system to replace our applicant tracking systems, how we’re going to find a better way to connect employees to employers. However, there are other ways to make connections and one of those ways that a lot of people often ignore is networking. My guest today, Andrea Macek, is a woman that actually helped me quite a bit on my own job search journey last year and is also starting a new initiative around helping people with their networking game. Andrea basic is the founder of AYM Consulting. --- Andrea, welcome to the program. Thanks, Stephen, for having me, it’s so fun to connect with you and support you in a different way so this is really fun. It’s always interesting to have these relationships that take on a couple of different forms and one of the weird things I always say is that this podcast, the first 10, 12 episodes really began with just me talking to my friends and sharing it out here, so it is important to cover all that networking. First of all, actually, before we get into networking, tell us a little bit about what AYM Consulting, your full business, is all about. Sure, thank you. So, yeah, my name is Andrea Macek and I am speaking to your community, hi, everyone, today as the founder and CEO of my career coaching business, AYM Consulting. And so I started this business after I got laid off back in 2019 from my corporate healthcare career. I was in healthcare for almost 10 years and this really was out of necessity and out of my own experience, if you will. So, I started my career, like a lot of people, not knowing what I was going to do. I actually was dropped into the job search in 2008 during the Great Recession, two degrees in hand ready to go conquer the world and the market had other plans for me. So, I became my own career coach kind of early on in my career and really had to develop different skills and pivot and understand the market in ways that’s a whole ’nother podcast episode, Stephen — Well, yeah, for sure. — in a way college does not prepare you. Oh, yeah. I’ve mentioned that plenty of times about our education system teaching you, “You get one wrong answer, you’re going to fail and failing is the worst thing ever,” and that’s just not how the world works. Not how the world works, no. I’m happy to come back and rant with you about that topic. I used to work at a college, I was the career advisor. So, long story short, over the past 10, 15 years, I’ve been able to grow and pivot my career in a multitude of ways and networking has been that foundation. And while I was working, I was an HR business partner, I was in healthcare for a long time, one of my main passions and expertise areas was supporting my team. I grew and developed my team, a lot of my team got promoted and moved on after working with them and coaching them so I’ve be...