A few years ago, I was invited to represent the education sector at a local high school’s career networking night. The campus decided to take a different approach to the typical career fair by setting up each presenter in a science fair-style, with booths that families could visit to learn about each career and ask questions, aiming to help students begin building professional networks. Dressed in their best clothes, clutching resumes, students walked nervously into a room full of professionals they’d never met.
One student approached my table but took up a post a few feet away for twenty minutes. She was clearly listening to the conversations I had with other students but seemed reluctant to start a conversation with me on her own. After manning my station for about an hour, I made my way to the refreshment table, choosing a route that would put her right in my path. “I like your pin!” I commented, pointing to the Black Girls are Magic declaration stuck to her backpack. “Are you interested in teaching?” I asked, striking up the conversation she seemed eager to initiate. We talked for quite a while, and after she appeared to warm up to me, I asked why she’d been so nervous to talk to anyone.
“I just didn’t know what to say,” she said, eyes meeting the floor.
When I left that cafeteria, I took the memory of that student with me. She has people in her life who already know her name. A neighbor who’s watched her grow up. A basketball coach who checks on her every week. An uncle in another state who asks how school’s going whenever they talk. She could practice talking about her future with any of them in her living room, on the driveway, after practice, places where she already feels safe. While her school was thinking innovatively about fostering deeper connections with professionals in her community, they never taught her how to make meaningful connections with adults, nor did they highlight for her that she could gain her earliest networking practice with people who already care whether she succeeds.
We know professional networks are critical for careers that pay a livable wage, as half of all jobs come through personal connections. Many schools go wrong by assuming that under-resourced communities lack the foundation for these networks. We focus on introducing students to adults we consider worthy, overlooking the relationships already in their lives. In her return to “The Learning Curve,” Julia Freeland Fisher from the Clayton Christensen Institute offers a different starting point: “It’s not about meeting new people. It’s about having new types of conversations with people you already know.”
What We Miss
Research shows students know far more people than they’re talking to about their futures, not because those adults can’t help, but because we haven’t normalized those conversations. In skipping the step of practicing networking and career conversations with the adults they know, we send a harmful message to students in under-resourced communities: you don’t know the right people.
Ed DeJesus, who runs Social Capital Builders, pushes back on this deficit thinking. When a student says, “I don’t know anyone,” Ed digs deeper. Where does your mom work? Does that company have other departments? Who do your relatives know? The network isn’t always obvious, but it’s rarely absent. Students just need help seeing it.
More importantly, they need practice. Confidence is the make-or-break factor in whether networking works. Confidence doesn’t come from high-stakes events with strangers. It comes from low-stakes practice with people who already care about you.
Research shows that ANY adult can have an effective career conversation with a student, regardless of their industry. They listen to the student’s interests, affirm skills they’re already demonstrating, acknowledge anxieties, and share their own career story. That conversation, even with a coach who’s never worked in the student’s target field, improves what researchers call “career alignment.” It builds the confidence students need to eventually approach strangers successfully.
The coach doesn’t unlock a professional network, but he gives that student practice making eye contact, articulating goals, and asking questions. Those are the social skills that open doors later. And because the coach already cares, the relationship outlasts the conversation. That student has one more person invested in their success.
What Schools Can Do
If graduates need skills, knowledge, and networks to reach economic mobility, we can’t only focus on the first two. Normalize career conversations as homework. Assign students to talk to a neighbor or coach about their career, not to unlock connections, but to practice. Help them ask: Who do I know that I haven’t talked to about my future? Use asset-based language. Never say “you don’t know the right people.” Say: “Let’s practice with people who already care about you.”
Principals, bridge family engagement and employer partnerships—those departments shouldn’t be separate! Make it an explicit goal to help students build confidence through existing relationships before external networking. Before you bring in one more guest speaker, ensure every student has had three conversations with adults they already know.
System leaders, budget for this work. Fund curricula like Connected Futures. Partner with organizations like Social Capital Builders. And measure what matters: do students graduate with the confidence and skills to build networks? Are they still connected to adults from your system years later? If relationships don’t outlast your intervention, you’re not building toward economic mobility.
The Bottom Line
Students in under-resourced communities don’t lack people who care about them. They lack practice in having conversations about their futures in low-stakes settings. When we skip building confidence with existing relationships and jump straight to networking with strangers, we set students up to fail. Then we blame them for not knowing how to network.
The pathway to economic mobility isn’t always about meeting new people. It’s about practicing with the people already there and building the confidence and skills that let students eventually walk into any room and advocate for themselves.
The student I met that night had everything she needed to practice. What she lacked wasn’t opportunity—it was permission and structure to use the relationships already in her life.
Have we helped every student practice with the people who already know their names?
