Modesty holding women back at work

A new study, carried out by LinkedIn’s ‘Career Control’ campaign, has shown that 56 per cent of women believe they are overlooked for a promotion because of modesty. Many believe that fear of coming across arrogant or big-headed is the main concern for growth, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

What’s interesting to see is that 43 per cent of women admit to feeling uncomfortable when networking with people they don’t know, compared to 33 percent of men respectively.

Many women also “shy away” from talking about their own achievements in interviews and job reviews.

This modesty and shyness is affecting women’s professional relationships online, as well as at the workplace, with a third of women admitting that they feel uncomfortable connecting with someone more senior on professional networking site LinkedIn too.

LinkedIn’s “Career Control” campaign is to help people plan their career. To help towards boosting women’s confidence, they have put together a number of top tips that will turn your shyness into high class networker!

* Have a plan: To be fulfilled at work, you first need to decide what you want from your career – what are you passionate about, and what’s going to get you out of bed in the morning? Once you’ve got an end goal in mind, it’s much easier to prioritise the connections you need to make, and the skills you need to develop to get there.

* Plot your path: Looking at people’s careers that you admire can help you plot your own career path.

* Do your research: Whether you are networking on or offline, the same golden rule applies – do your research- If you know who’s attending an event, for example, you can come armed with conversation starters, likewise having a bit of background on the people you are networking with online can help you tailor your patter.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 5^th, 2014.

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