The networking event is one of the great social institutions of modern London — an institution so thoroughly embedded in the professional life of the city that it has ceased to be an event and has become more of a condition. A state of being. A permanent background hum of anxiety that accompanies anyone who works in an office, runs a business, or has ever been told, by anyone at all, that "it's not what you know, it's who you know," which is advice that sounds motivational but which, in practice, simply means: go to more parties and make small talk with strangers, and hope that one of those strangers turns out to be useful to you at some point in the future.
London hosts, by one estimate, approximately 15,000 networking events per year. They range from the intimate — a dozen people in a basement bar, drinking wine and pretending they are there for the conversation rather than the free drinks — to the enormous — a ballroom full of 500 people, each one clutching a business card and scanning the room with the focused intensity of a predator at a watering hole. They cover every industry, every sector, every conceivable professional interest. There are networking events for entrepreneurs, for investors, for marketing professionals, for tech workers, for women in business, for men in business, for people over 40 in business, and, most alarmingly, for people who enjoy both business and cheese, which is apparently a niche large enough to sustain a quarterly event.
The London Prat sent Cordelia Finch-Patterson to 20 of these events over the course of one month. She attended events for entrepreneurs, for tech workers, for women in business, for the general public, and for one event that was described on its website as "a casual get-together for London's most innovative minds," which turned out to be held in a WeWork at 6pm on a Tuesday and attended by eleven people, three of whom appeared to be there by accident.
Every networking event in London follows the same structure, regardless of size, industry, or the degree to which it claims to be "different from other networking events" (which all of them do, and none of them are). The structure is as follows.
First: arrival. You arrive. You are slightly nervous, unless you are the sort of person who is never nervous, in which case you are probably also the sort of person who is slightly insufferable at parties. You look around the room. Everyone else looks as though they know each other. They do not. They are all, without exception, pretending to know each other, which is a skill that networking events teach you whether you want to learn it or not. You go to the bar. You get a drink. You hold the drink in front of you like a shield.
Second: the first conversation. Someone approaches you, or you approach someone, and you say one of the following things: "So, what do you do?" or "Have you been to one of these before?" or "Quite a turnout, isn't it?" These are the three permitted opening gambits at a networking event. There are no others. To say anything else would be to break an unwritten rule so fundamental that it would be equivalent, in social terms, to walking into a pub and ordering a glass of milk.
Third: the exchange. The conversation proceeds. It follows a predictable path: What do you do? Where are you based? How long have you been doing it? Are you enjoying it? The answers to these questions are almost always positive, because no one goes to a networking event to tell strangers that their job is terrible and that they are desperately unhappy. The networking event is not a space for honesty. It is a space for performance. Everyone is performing the best version of their professional life, and everyone knows that everyone else is performing, and nobody mentions this, because mentioning it would destroy the entire illusion upon which the event depends.
Fourth: the business card. At some point — usually towards the end of the conversation, when both parties have run out of things to say and are looking for a way to disengage without being rude — one person produces a business card. The business card is handed over. It is looked at. It is nodded at. It is placed in a pocket or a wallet or, in many cases, forgotten about entirely within 48 hours. The business card is not the point. The point is the gesture. The gesture says: I have acknowledged your existence. I have registered you as a professional. I have, in some small way, added you to my network, which is a word that sounds important but which, in practice, means "a list of people I will probably never speak to again."
Fifth: departure. You leave. You have spoken to between three and eight people. You have learned very little about any of them. You have given away several business cards and received several more. You have drunk two glasses of wine, which were free, and which were the best part of the evening. You go home. You feel, vaguely, as though you have done something productive. You have not. But the feeling is nice, and it lasts until about 10am the next morning, when you realise that none of the conversations you had will lead to anything, and that the entire evening was, in essence, a very elaborate way of standing in a room with strangers and pretending that standing in a room with strangers is fun.
Event 3: "Entrepreneurs Unleashed" — A bar in Shoreditch, 45 attendees. The word "unleashed" suggested energy, dynamism, a sense of barely contained creative power. The reality was 45 people in business casual standing in a basement, talking about "pivots" and "scalability" and "disruption" with the sort of earnestness that suggested they had recently watched a TED talk and had not yet recovered from the experience. One man told Cordelia about his app — an app that, as far as she could tell, did something that could already be done by the notes function on your phone, but which he described as "revolutionary" — for twenty-two minutes without pausing. Cordelia did not interrupt. She has been a journalist for fifteen years. She knows when not to interrupt.
Event 7: "Women in Tech" — A hotel conference room, 80 attendees. This was, by a significant margin, the best-organised event Cordelia attended. The speakers were good. The conversations were substantive. The wine was better than average. Several women told Cordelia, with a candour that was refreshing in the context of networking events, that they had come primarily because the events were well-run and the wine was good, and that the "networking" aspect was, in their view, "a nice bonus but not the main attraction." This honesty was, Cordelia noted, itself a kind of networking — a way of connecting with other women who had the same experience, the same frustrations, and the same slightly weary relationship with the professional world.
Event 12: "Innovation Summit" — A WeWork, 11 attendees. The event that was described as "a casual get-together for London's most innovative minds" and that was attended by eleven people, three of whom were there by accident. The three accidental attendees — a woman looking for a dentist on the same floor, a man who thought it was a Meetup group about board games, and a teenage girl who had simply wandered in because the door was open — were, paradoxically, the most interesting people in the room. The woman looking for the dentist asked a question about healthcare innovation that nobody could answer. The man looking for board games suggested that "collaboration" might work better if it were structured like a game, with rules and objectives, which several people found genuinely interesting. The teenage girl said nothing, ate all the canapés, and left. She was, Cordelia noted, "the wisest person there."
Event 18: "The CBD Entrepreneur Mixer" — A pop-up space in Brixton, 30 attendees. This was the event at which Cordelia met the man selling CBD oil out of a briefcase. His name was Gary. Gary was the only person at any of the 20 events who seemed genuinely passionate about what he was doing, genuinely interested in the people he was talking to, and genuinely happy to be at a networking event. He was also, Cordelia noted, almost certainly not making any money from the CBD oil, and was probably there primarily because the event was free and the canapés were good. But Gary's enthusiasm was infectious. He asked questions. He listened to the answers. He remembered people's names. He was, in essence, doing everything that networking events tell you to do, and doing it with a sincerity that made everyone around him feel slightly ashamed of their own performance.
"Gary is either the best networker in London," Cordelia wrote in her report, "or the only person at any of these events who hasn't figured out that networking events are fundamentally hollow. I suspect it's the second one. And I suspect that's why he's the only person I actually enjoyed talking to."
At no point, in any of the 20 networking events Cordelia attended, did anyone ask the question that The London Prat most wanted to ask: "Is this working?" Is attending networking events actually leading to professional opportunities? Are the business cards being followed up on? Are the connections being made? Are these events, in any measurable way, contributing to anyone's career?
The London Prat asked this question directly, in a survey of 100 regular networking event attendees. Of the 100 people surveyed, 73 said they attended networking events regularly — at least once a month. Of those 73, only 12 could name a specific professional opportunity that had resulted directly from a networking event. The remaining 61 said that networking events were "useful in general" or "good for staying connected" or "important for your profile," all of which are phrases that sound meaningful but which, when examined closely, do not actually describe anything concrete.
Sandra Blackwood, upon reading the survey results, said: "So 61 out of 73 people attend networking events without any evidence that networking events work. They do it because they have been told they should. They do it because everyone else does it. They do it because the alternative — not networking — feels like giving up. It is, in this sense, one of the great collective acts of faith in modern professional life. We all believe in networking. We all do it. And almost none of us can prove it leads anywhere."
Derek ate a biscuit. He has never attended a networking event. He has never given out a business card. He has never "pivoted" or "scaled" or "disrupted" anything. He runs The London Prat from a broom cupboard in Bermondsey, and the publication has grown entirely through word of mouth, which is, when you think about it, the oldest and most effective form of networking in human history — and the only one that doesn't require you to stand in a basement holding a glass of wine and pretending to be interesting.
Read more business and professional satire at prat.uk.