Wonder Story


At work we have been organizing a series of educational meet-ups.

All 6 of us pitch in with these meet-ups.

My task was to arrange speakers.

I wondered how I was going to bring in speakers.

One day in 2016, I was looking at my LinkedIn feed and found Rakesh Kana’s story of how he and his wife (both newcomers to Canada) were having a difficult time finding a job.  They were using all the traditional methods that you can think of to find a job, but to no avail.  They decided to take a novel approach to their job search by wearing sandwich boards and handing out their resumes to passersby while standing in front of Union Station in Toronto.  They were successful in landing jobs.

Rakesh wrote a LinkedIn post about his and his wife’s job search experiences.  You can read their post here.

I was inspired by Rakesh’s post and I wrote a post that referenced them.   

Flash forward a couple of weeks ago.

I messaged Rakesh on LinkedIn to see if he would be interested in presenting a talk at one of our educational meet-ups.  I hadn’t talked to Rakesh in awhile, I wasn’t even sure if he would remember me, and to my amazement he said “yes” to coming and presenting a talk!  We had a telephone conversation to make arrangements.  Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting Rakesh!

By June 13th we will have had 13 speakers at these educational meet-ups. 

I knew 4 of these speakers prior to my asking them. I met all 4 at networking events where someone had to strike up a conversation with the other.   

Amazingly I hadn’t met the other 9 speakers before their presentations!  Some of these speakers were referrals.  Some of these speakers I had connected with on LinkedIn and we messaged from time to time. 

One day my manager and I were listening to a webinar.  We both thought that one of the webinar presenters would be a fitting speaker to speak at an educational meet-up.  I contacted the webinar presenter by phone about coming to speak and amazingly she agreed! 

It goes to show you that you can network on LinkedIn or by phone or in person.  

I was lucky enough to be able to leverage my network and find speakers for our meet-ups!  

Sometimes all you need to do is to ask.

But remember to give in return.


I suppose what goes around, comes around.



Also Published on LinkedIn on: May 26, 2017
Image Credit: Pixabay

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