Thank you to all those of you who have completed our latest survey on Unemployment and the Internet.  We will announce the winners of the two £50 John Lewis vouchers at the end of this month.

In the meantime, we will share any interesting finds with you as they emerge - and something interesting has already caught our eye.

We'd like you to think about yourself for a minute.  Think about your family and your friends, your ex- or current colleagues, your Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter acquaintances, members of any clubs and societies you attend, your neighbours.  How many people are you thinking of?  More than you can number?  And how many different lines of work are these people in?  These people are your network.

Now multiply this.  Imagine the size of the network if you combined yours with those of, say, 10 other job seekers.  Already you'd have access to many hundreds - possibly thousands - of people in any number of different professions.  Even if the 10 other job seekers came from entirely different backgrounds to yours, the chance of this network featuring at least one individual who could provide you with job leads is extremely high.

Official statistics suggest that, in the current job market, a third of job vacancies are secured by candidates who found the role through their network.  In our experience, this figure is much higher.  But even the lower estimate is enough to prove the value of a large network in today's job market.  Your immediate contacts need not necessarily come from a professional background like yours, but they will almost certainly connect you to people who do.

Despite this, over a third of respondents to our survey claimed that there was no point in networking with other job seekers unless they were all from a similar industry.  Not so!  Our aim is to help you get back into work as quickly as possible and we know that professional networking can achieve this.  Do we sound like we're evangelising?  We are!  Networking is crucial.

We're taking steps to make this easier for you, but in the meantime why don't you give networking a try?  If you're not already registered on Linkedin, sign up. It's a great way of developing a network without dedicating chunks of your time to face-to-face networking events.  If the personal touch is more your thing, why not visit GB Job Clubs to find out about networking opportunities?  You can read more about GB Job Clubs' work in this recent Guardian article.