I've long advocated three basic approaches to growing your career. 

1- Make sure you actually have the skill set to the the job.
2 - If don't have the skill set, go get it. 
3- Make sure you meet people, early and often.  You never know what will happen. 

It's point #3 that drives this story. Stay with me here.

I was in El Paso, Texas recently leading a multimedia training project for college educators.  One of my mentees is a freelance public radio reporter who lives in El Paso.  I posted on Facebook that I was in El Paso and a former intern of mine (who lives in Mexico City) wrote saying a friend of hers (who is a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Mexico City) is in El Paso too and we should meet.  Being "The Connector" I thought I'd arrange for my mentee in El Paso to meet the WSJ correspondent. You never know right? 

We three met up for drinks and we're talking about a shooting along the US-Mexico border that happened a day earlier. While we talked my mentee said she wished she was covering the border shooting.  Suddenly, she received a text message from a network correspondent who said he was going to do the story unless she could make a strong case.  My mentee then turns and asks WSJ reporter if he had any contacts. He'd just spent the day in Ciudad Juarez (the city adjacent to El Paso, across the border) developing his WSJ piece on the shooting.  He did have some contacts and he kindly gave her one.  She made the phone call, lined up an interview with a witness to the shooting.  My mentee files her story for the network 12 hours later.  Journalists comprise a highly competitive cabal but I think younger ones are less so.

Yes, she was lucky.  You have to be at times no matter what your professional background. But, you can create your own luck.  By coming out to meet the WSJ reporter my mentee now has another journalist as a contact and this chance meeting resulted in her getting a national story on the air and getting paid. This specific example have been about "broadcast journalism," but my point is more about a philosophy regardless of your industry. Meeting people, staying in contact by using some form of social media and just asking for help can take you from not knowing to being in the know.

Ya know?

*Chantal de la Rionda edits this blog