How to land your dream job in Israel: A guide |
What exactly is professional networking, really?
In America, I always imagined it involved LinkedIn. Maybe a blazer. Certainly some degree of intentionality. You go to a conference, exchange business cards, send follow-up emails nobody reads, and slowly construct a guaranteed career through degrees, internships, credentials, and the kind of carefully curated professional relationships that are fairly transactional even when everyone is pretending otherwise.
In Israel, apparently, networking means accidentally changing the trajectory of your professional life while slightly tipsy at the Jerusalem Wine Festival.
A few weeks back, my husband and I went to the festival at The First Station, and I cannot recommend it enough. There was good wine, excellent wine, and wine I pretended to understand but mostly selected based on whether the label looked expensive. Little stands with kosher cheese and fancy chocolate. Every variety of person Jerusalem has to offer wandering around holding tasting glasses with the studied gravitas of serious connoisseurs. We left with three bottles, one of which is technically for my father, though I strongly suspect it will never reach him (I mostly needed to invent a responsible adult recipient to justify the price to myself).
But beyond being a genuinely........