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Written by: Andrew Bowins
After 50, our professional networks should be one of our greatest career advantages. Research says they are. So why does “connecting” increasingly feel like being added to somebody’s sales funnel?
I have developed a new LinkedIn reflex. Someone I don’t know sends me a connection request. I look at the profile, see enough common ground and accept. Then I wait. Before long, the message arrives: Andrew, thanks for connecting. I work with senior executives who… And there it is. We have barely met, yet somehow a diagnosis has been made and a solution is already available.
My first instinct is irritation. My second, thankfully, is to wonder whether I’m being unfair. I spent decades in corporate communications selling ideas, advocating positions, building relationships and trying to persuade people to do things. I’ve built a business. I promote my own work. I’m hardly qualified to become the etiquette police of LinkedIn. So maybe the person pitching me isn’t doing anything wrong. Coaches need clients. Consultants need business. Job seekers need opportunities. Everybody is trying to make something happen.
Still, something about the sequence bothers me. We’ve connected. But have we actually connected?
The Network Is Supposed to Be Our Advantage
Nearly every conversation about finding work later in life eventually arrives at the same advice: Use your network.There’s good reason for that. Research from AARP and LinkedIn found that workers 50 and older have professional networks 20.4% larger than younger workers, and those networks include more senior people. Workers over 50 also average 18.5 years in leadership roles, compared with 7.7 years for younger professionals. AARP and LinkedIn research on experienced workers
That should be a formidable advantage, especially when the job market can be unforgiving. AARP research found that 67% of adults 50 and older in the workforce believed finding a job would be difficult. Among those anticipating difficulty, 35% pointed to age discrimination as the primary reason. AARP research on working and job hunting after 50
Put those findings together and our networks start to look less like something we collect and more like career infrastructure. But what actually makes one valuable?
When the Phone Gets Quiet
I thought I had a big network during my corporate career. By any numerical measure, I did. There were colleagues, employees, bosses, customers, journalists, recruiters and agency partners spread across companies and countries. Then my corporate career ended. The title disappeared, the calendar cleared and the phone became considerably quieter.
That can mess with your head. When you’ve spent decades being busy and needed, silence raises an uncomfortable question: Were people calling because of me, or because of the chair I happened to be sitting in? The answer, of course, is both. There’s humility in discovering that, but also freedom.
Building RestlessUrban eventually gave me a different kind of work and community, but that quieter period changed how I think about professional relationships. I had spent decades building a network. Only after leaving corporate life did I begin to understand which relationships had roots beyond the work that originally brought us together.
Then the Research Changed My Mind
My instinct when I started thinking about this issue was pretty simple: forget all these superficial connections and concentrate on the people you actually know.
Turns out, I may have been wrong.
A large randomized experiment involving more than 20 million LinkedIn users, 2 billion new connections and 600,000 jobs found that weaker professional ties can be particularly valuable for job mobility. People outside our immediate circles can expose us to information and opportunities our closest colleagues and friends simply don’t encounter. The effect is nuanced, but the evidence supports the value of reaching beyond the people we already know well. MIT analysis of the LinkedIn weak-ties research
That complicates my grumpy-old-man theory considerably. Maybe connecting with people we barely know isn’t the problem at all. Maybe that’s exactly what we should be doing. The question is what happens after we click “Accept.”
LinkedIn has made it remarkably easy to reach another person. It hasn’t made it any easier to know one.
The Problem Isn’t the Pitch
I don’t object to people selling things. If you have a useful service, sell it. If you need work, tell people. If you can solve a problem, say so. What bothers me is what we sometimes skip before making the ask.
A connection request gives us access to another person. It doesn’t give us a relationship with them. Somewhere between Thanks for connecting and Here’s my calendar, we seem to have eliminated the part where two people figure out whether they have any reason to know one another.
Maybe ask a question first. What are you working on? Why did you reach out? What caught your attention? Is there something we share? Could I possibly help you? Not because some networking formula says we must exchange three pleasantries before producing the sales deck. That would be just as artificial. Because curiosity is how we discover whether there’s actually something there.
Maybe Network Smaller
So perhaps the answer isn’t fewer connections. The research suggests those looser ties really do matter. Maybe it’s being more intentional about what we do with them.
This week, reach out to a few people already somewhere in your orbit. Someone you genuinely miss. Someone who once helped you. Someone doing something you find interesting. And maybe someone you can help without immediately asking for anything back.
No elaborate networking strategy. No carefully calculated reciprocity. Just a conversation.
The research tells us weaker connections can expose us to new opportunities. Experience tells me deeper relationships matter too. After 50, perhaps our advantage is having enough of both to stop treating every interaction like a transaction.
So, Am I Just Getting Grumpy?
Possibly. I’m approaching 60, and I’m self-aware enough to know that mild irritation can occasionally masquerade as accumulated wisdom. But leaving corporate life taught me something LinkedIn can’t measure. When the title changes and the calendar clears, some relationships fade. Others deepen. A few people you never expected show up. Some you expected to hear from don’t. That isn’t an indictment of networking. That’s simply how relationships work.
The encouraging part is that those of us over 50 may be sitting on a professional advantage we underestimate. We have larger networks, years of shared experiences and connections extending well beyond our immediate circles. Some of the people we barely know may even be precisely the people who expose us to what comes next.
So yes, work your network. Meet people. Reconnect. Ask for the introduction. Tell people what you’re looking for. And if you have something worthwhile to sell, sell it. Just remember there’s another person on the other side of the connection request. Maybe get to know them before deciding what they need.
And if your first message tells me you’ve been “following my journey closely,” I reserve the right to remain a little grumpy.