Fragment 11 - Using offline network

I define my offline network as people that I have met face-to-face. These people are most often also part of my online network as contacts, but not necessarily. The starting point of using this network was telling everybody what I was looking for. This way they would have me in mind if something relevant came up. Here are a couple of examples of how this worked:

During a conversation with a former colleague i told him about my plans of getting abroad, and that the Arabic Gulf area was one of my target regions. He remembered that another former colleague had worked in a company with extensive international presence, including an office in Dubai. I contacted this person and he put me in contact with a person in the company in question. This contact person forwarded the mail to the relevant person in the company, and I had a meeting with this person. It appeared that it was not possible to go to Dubai, but there was a potential job in Singapore. However because of re-organisation in the company this job disappeared.

One of my fellow students had worked for a mobile operator with international presence. He put me in contact with a former colleague woh was still working for the company. Over a period she sent a number of open positions. But unfortunately without concrete result.