Building Your Professional Network with Coliving in Valencia
Today, networking is a crucial aspect of professional growth and success.
For most people, professional paths are not straightforward as they used to be, and the growth opportunities are more abundant, creative, and unique. This calls for active exploration of opportunities around us, and networking is the best way to approach it.
By building relationships with other professionals, you can expand your knowledge, find new connections, learn about things you have never heard of, and gain valuable insights.
As a city full of international professionals and inspiring young people, Valencia's professional network offers a wealth of opportunities for those looking to make meaningful connections. Individuals can find others to connect with through cultural events, coworking spaces, being flatmates, going to social gatherings, etc.
One effective way to get involved is through coliving, which provides an opportunity to live and work alongside like-minded professionals. Coliving doesn’t just promise you a creative and inspiring bunch of roommates but also encourages professional growth and meaningful connections.
In this article, we’ll explore how coliving can help you expand your professional network in more detail.
How can coliving help you expand your professional network?
As we already mentioned, coliving allows individuals to live and connect with others like themselves. It is somewhat of a crossover between flat-sharing and a social club focusing on the benefits of both.
Like flat-sharing, it allows people to live together, but with a community-first approach, focusing on creating a community of like-minded people. On the other hand, it also has elements of a social club, where people come to make friends and share interests. Like in a social club, those who are not interested in making new connections would simply not choose to join.
But, the most significant advantage of coliving, compared to other experiences, is the opportunity it provides to share your day-to-day life with others. With a community-first approach, living together involves more than just bumping into each other in the hallways; it means genuinely sharing a life, similar to the relationship you would have with your family or partner.
Sharing life with others creates a unique bond that cannot be replicated in other situations, bringing people closer together and opening the door to new experiences. It also teaches individuals to coexist with others and foster genuine and spontaneous interactions, which is a key to a more profound relationship and a stronger network.
Here are some elements of colivings that make them so beneficial for making connections:
Big international community
Coliving provides an opportunity to be part of a diverse and international community that can challenge your professional views in so many ways.
Living with people from different countries and cultures means being exposed to a variety of languages, customs, and perspectives. This type of multicultural environment offers a unique opportunity to broaden your understanding of the world and challenge your assumptions and biases. This also applies to perspectives different cultures have on work, productivity, success, and knowledge.
You might find some perspectives and approaches to work, as well as some tools or strategies that come from other cultures to work better for you. Building a professional network to be this diverse will give you constant access to different approaches and insights helping you view your professional path as more flexible and adjustable to your needs.
Additionally, as an entrepreneur or freelancer, having an international community through coliving can help you reach new markets and customers or clients that you may not have had access to otherwise.
By building relationships with professionals from different countries, you can gain insights into new markets and develop connections that can help you expand your business globally.
People from different backgrounds
Other than providing you with a culturally diverse community, coliving also brings together people from different industries, roles, seniority levels, and education.
In life, our most frequent interactions with other professionals happen in the circle close to us - same industry, same company, same education. If you don’t go above and beyond to explore and learn new things, you will most likely network with people somewhat close to what you do.
Even if you intentionally decide to explore more things and interact with people from a completely different industry, you would still need to be informed about this industry and already have some knowledge of it.
Coliving allows you to meet people from industries, roles, or educational experiences you might have never heard of before. This gives you an element of surprise and allows you to dip your toes into a completely new (and maybe unexpected) perspective.
Even if not unexpected, in the “outside world” it might be hard to reach some people such as senior-level professionals, or people from industries not close to you at all. Coliving facilitates this experience and breaks down this barrier.
In coliving, individuals are much more open to sharing their experiences and knowledge with others and pursuing professional connections which can lead to new business opportunities, collaborations, and partnerships. That’s why coliving is a perfect pool for potential mentorship, learning, and development, and an environment of continuous learning and growth.
Like-minded people
A coliving environment typically sustains like-minded individuals who are eager to connect and grow both personally and professionally. This creates an atmosphere that is easy to approach, fostering an environment where tenants can collaborate, share their passions, and build lasting relationships.
In our adult lives, it can be hard to make connections with people you don’t know. We often don’t have much time with strangers to build that slow, spontaneous relationship, so we need to act on it fast, and that first step can be overwhelming as you cannot be sure that the person is open to connecting. Some people are uninterested in making new friends or too busy to open new chapters in their lives, so gambling with rejection or feeling like you might be pushing your friendship on somebody can be unpleasant.
Coliving takes out this barrier because you start with the fact that everybody is open to connecting. This takes a huge weight off the shoulders and makes it easier to be yourself and naturally approach people. Also, coliving allows you more time to connect with others slowly. Instead of needing to invite a stranger for a coffee, you can just have it every morning in the coliving together.
Besides that, tenants in coliving spaces often have similar interests or views on life, which can lead to the formation of communities within the larger network. Coliving operators often carefully choose tenants so there is a much higher chance you will meet people who understand you. This doesn’t just mean that you will enrich your network with your new colivers, but also have access to the network they’re coming with.
The fact that everyone is looking to connect and grow makes it an ideal space for professionals seeking to expand their network and find support from others who share their goals.
Access to a wider local network
One of the key advantages of coliving is access to a wider local network. Especially when the coliving is locally-focused and owned, it has its connections and insights into places where you can make connections around the city. This can include events, spots for gatherings, learning spots, and more.
Besides their lives in the coliving, colivers also explore the city on their own, based on their hobbies, interests, etc., which ends with mixing their external connections with their internal ones. By doing so, they introduce new people to other tenants creating new opportunities for everybody to expand their professional and personal networks beyond the confines of the coliving community.
Moreover, having a local host who owns and manages the coliving space can be particularly beneficial for tenants. A local host has their own network to share with colivers, which can be especially helpful for those who are new to the area or looking to expand their network. The host can provide recommendations for networking events, introduce tenants to their contacts, and generally help them get more involved in the local community.
With the guidance and support of a local host, colivers can take full advantage of the opportunities available to them in the local area, making valuable connections and growing both personally and professionally.
Vivarium's Network
In Vivarium, we nurture these possibilities for professional and personal growth and we like to look at our community as the perfect way to expand your network.
As a coliving with a community-first approach, we try to inspire our community to create an environment where connection and collaboration are valued.
Our network is made up of three parts:
The primary network (the current colivers),
The wider network that consists of our ex-colivers and friends of current colivers,
The wider local Valencia network.
Most people form deep connections with the colivers they live with (typically around 10 like-minded folks), but they also form relationships with individuals who stayed in Vivarium before and who often visit and join us for activities, or external connections with other colivers. Lastly, with access to the wider local Valencia network, we want our colivers to be able to expand their professional reach even further.
We’ve witnessed a lot of successful networking within Vivarium. For example, two girls who met in Vivarium discovered their skills are very compatible and decided to try and organize a retreat together, creating a unique and fruitful collaboration, and in another instance, two colivers came together to collaborate on a European research project.
Our community is co-created and we don’t promise you will find your perfect business partner in Vivarium, but with such a rich and diverse network, it is impossible not to make any connection if you are willing to.
