What I eventually learned was that asking for someone’s card isn’t about the card at all. It’s about signaling interest, building connection, and creating a network long before you need one.

A few years ago at the Food Marketing Institute trade show, the cab line stretched nearly 100 yards. A woman I’d met earlier asked if she could join me and share a ride. I was glad for the company.

During the ride, she told me something that stuck with me.

She had spent more than a decade at Procter & Gamble and believed that building relationships outside the company was disloyal. She avoided people at other manufacturers, former colleagues, and especially corporate recruiters.

By the time we shared that cab, she had left P&G, joined another company, left that one too—and now she was unemployed with almost no network to lean on.

She laughed at the irony of sharing a cab with me, a recruiter she would’ve avoided ten years earlier.

Talking with the few people she still knew at the show, she realized how many opportunities she had unintentionally closed herself off from. She was talented, but she wasn’t a master at networking. She had never built the relationships that sustain a career through change.

Today, networking is easier than ever—trade shows, online groups, LinkedIn, industry communities, even the people sitting a few desks away.

But the principle hasn’t changed:
Your network is an investment you build long before you need it.

The person who first encouraged me to become a master at networking understood something long before the rest of us. What platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook have scaled into massive enterprises is really just this: helping people stay connected.

And staying connected is what keeps careers moving forward.