Business referrals are like gold and need to be treated as such. Peer to peer networking serves in many capacities during a career, but perhaps it’s most vital role is when it becomes a life line.

“Her home computer contains a professional network of 600 contacts she developed during her search, and she doesn’t intend to let them lapse.

“Networking isn’t about trading business cards,” she said. “It’s about being very genuine, very generous and trying to help people.”

Her network sustained her when she got laid off last year from a software start-up. “I felt as if I were being cradled by warm hands,” she said.

“These aren’t people I’m going to cry on their shoulders. These are professional relationships. I had more than one person say, ‘My Rolodex is open.’ Extremely busy people made time to counsel me.”

Depositing good will into and actively participating with your peer network is quite literally like putting money in the bank. Unpleasant figures from a recent study suggests that the usual buffer for degree professionals from the harsh realities of unemployment has become considerably  less substantial.

College-educated workers lose jobs more often today than they did 20 years ago, and the jobless recovery that followed the 2001 recession hit information technology professionals like Brown especially hard. Nearly 10 percent of college-educated workers lost jobs between 2001 and 2003, up from less than 7 percent in the early 1980s, said Princeton University economist Henry Farber.
(Source)

It is something to keep an eye when you cast a cynical eye at the demands of peer to peer networking.