Community Contribution #7 – Informational Interview
This week, I conducted an informational interview with an associate portfolio manager at an investment firm in Victoria. Before the meeting, I reviewed his LinkedIn profile and noticed that he, too, had come to UVic as an international student. This shared background gave us an easy icebreaker and turned the meeting into a genuine conversation.
Going into the meeting, I assumed technical skill mattered most in finance. He changed my view. He explained that culture fit, which means working well with others and understanding different perspectives, often matters just as much. Technical skills can be taught on the job, but people skills take years of practice.
Connectivism describes learning as connecting with different people and sources across a network (Goldie, 2016). LinkedIn connects me with hundreds of people sharing career advice, but most of it is written for everyone. Talking with him gave me advice that fit my situation. Over coffee, he used the coffee shop itself to show me how a business makes money and why it can be a good investment. He also shared a Warren Buffett quote. “We don’t have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest” (Smoteks, 2020). His point was that steady effort matters more than raw talent.
Lessons like that are hard to get from a feed. Dunbar (2016) found that online networks end up about the same size as offline ones, because real relationships still need time in person. Since we can only keep so many close relationships, not every contact needs to become a close friend. In fact, a study of 20 million LinkedIn users found that moderately weak ties had the biggest effect on job mobility (Rajkumar et al., 2022, as cited in Klein, 2022). Meeting this portfolio manager turned him from a name on LinkedIn into that kind of tie in my personal learning network (PLN). LinkedIn helped me prepare, but meeting him is what made the connection valuable.
References
Dunbar, R. I. M. (2016). Do online social media cut through the constraints that limit the size of offline social networks? Royal Society Open Science, 3(1), 150292. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150292
Goldie, J. G. S. (2016). Connectivism: A knowledge learning theory for the digital age? Medical Teacher, 38(10), 1064–1069. https://doi.org/10.3109/0142159X.2016.1173661
Klein, P. (2022, September 16). New study proves that weak ties have strong employment value. MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. https://ide.mit.edu/insights/new-study-proves-that-weak-ties-have-strong-employment-value/
Smoteks, H. (2020, December 4). 23 Warren Buffett quotes on leadership and success: Nuggets of wisdom. Market Me Good. https://marketmegood.com/blog/warren-buffett-quotes-on-leadership