The beauty of your PLN is that it can evolve with you, and continue to grow as you do both personally and professionally. It isn’t uncommon as people go through their lives and join the workforce that they end up in a field of work that is vastly different from where they had thought they’d be. If you think rigidly in this mindset of my PLN must be for this specific career path, then if that changes you can find yourself lost, and in some cases just abandoning your PLN together. This is why it’s important to remember that a PLN is not necessarily a roadmap to be followed strictly, but is rather a system of support and outreach that will help develop your path in whatever form that ends up taking. That is why there is so much potential for my own PLN to be used in a professional setting even after the duration of this course; because my PLN can and is curated to however I need it to be and will be like that regardless of what path I do end up taking. And this doesn’t just apply to me, if a few years down the road you find yourself heading in a new direction, then you can simply reevaluate who is within your PLN and see how they can likely still contribute valuable information or experience even if it was not how you anticipated, and adjust your goals and plans of action as needed.

For instance, my mother worked in hospitality for most of her life and had a number of professional friends in that setting as they all knew each other. My mother recently had a change of paths, and is now a leasing agent and does property management instead. The professional connections she made in hospitality are not suddenly useless though, instead those same people were able to reach out to their own connections or friends and make the transition for my mother easier as they knew people in the field, or send her stories about situations from their own careers that although are different – still hit similar marks. This is a great example not only of how each person has their own PLN and in doing so that helps expand yours (in this case, it is my mother’s colleagues being able to utilize their own PLN to help her) as well as an example of the ways that even if not every person in your PLN is doing the exact same thing as you – they still have something valuable they bring to the table.

In terms of expanding my own PLN into spaces that may be outside my comfort zone, I think it’s important to remember that taking leaps is okay! And in many ways will reap better rewards or at the very least will be of value as a lesson learned. Reaching outside of your own comfort zone is of course intimidating, but it is outside of your comfort zone that you are often able to grow the most. If people never encountered challenges, setbacks, and new things; then they would never reach new levels both personally and professionally, and that is why I will always be looking for new people and new perspectives that challenge my thinking and are outside of my own bubble of comfort. There are other ways to leave my comfort zone too; meeting people who do not communicate in primarily English, people who may be much older than I, and people who are in vastly different career paths are all things that might be outside of my comfort zone, but that is exactly why I should welcome it and hopefully find that we can all add a lot to each other’s goals and careers.