How to Build a Postdoc Network in Germany Before You Need One

June 7, 2026 · Career & Academic Advice · 12 min read

"Rate your network in Germany from zero to ten."

I ask this question to almost everyone who comes to me about life after a PhD. A researcher I spoke with recently, two years into a fully funded position, did not pause for long. She said two. Not because she had spent those two years doing nothing. Because she had spent them doing everything except this.

I have a version of this conversation often enough that the number stopped surprising me years ago. It is almost always low: two, three, occasionally a generous four. These are not people who failed to build anything. They built a thesis, a skill set, sometimes a publication record strong enough to make a hiring committee sit up. What most of them never built, on purpose or by accident, is the one thing that decides whether any of that gets seen in time: a group of people in the field who already know their name before the application lands. A recent conversation made the gap, and the fix for it, clear enough to write down properly.

The Independence You Already Have and Aren't Using

If you are on a funded scholarship, fellowship, or research grant during your PhD, here is something worth saying plainly: you do not work for your supervisor. You are funded by an organisation that exists specifically to support researchers in your position, independent of whether your professor is happy with you, agrees with your direction, or has any idea what you do with your evenings.

That distinction sounds technical. It is not. It means the hours outside your formal commitments are genuinely yours to spend. You do not need permission to email a research group in another city. You do not need a green light from your supervisor to spend a Saturday visiting a different institute. In most cases, you do not even need to mention that you are doing it.

Almost nobody on a funded position thinks about their time this way. They behave as though the supervisor who oversees the thesis also owns the rest of the working life around it. He does not. The moment you stop behaving as if he does, the rest of this post stops being theory and starts being a plan for the months you have left.

What "Knowing About a Lab" Actually Means

Ask most PhD researchers whether they have a network in their field, and the answer is yes. Ask them to put a number on it, zero to ten, and the number drops fast.

The test I use is simple, and it has nothing to do with how many people have heard of you. I ask how many people you actually know: their names, what they currently work on, what they have published in the last two years, whether their group is hiring, growing, or quietly winding down. Run that filter and most lists collapse by half before the second question lands.

Following someone on LinkedIn is not knowing them. Having read one paper from their group three years ago is not knowing them. Recognising an institute's name on a conference programme is not knowing them. These are all forms of awareness. None of them is a network, and none of them will produce a phone call when a position quietly opens.

This reframing matters because it changes what the actual task is. The task in front of you is not "build a network from nothing." Almost nobody starts from nothing. Most researchers can already half-name fifteen or twenty groups doing work close to theirs. The task is to convert "I have heard of them" into "I know exactly where they stand, and they have started to recognise my name too" for enough of those groups that something eventually opens.

Build the List Before You Do Anything Else

Before any email goes out, before any visit gets planned, there is a list. Not a vague mental shortlist of names you might get round to. An actual document, in whatever format you will keep open and actually update, that grows every week you work on it.

Build it in three passes.

Pass one: write down what is already in your head. Every institute, lab, research group, and lead researcher whose name you would recognise on sight. For each one, note the institution, the group, the lead, and anyone in it whose work overlaps with yours. This first pass usually produces somewhere between fifteen and thirty names, more than most people expect to find sitting in their own memory, and a clear sign of how much was already there, simply uncatalogued.

Pass two: widen it with the tools that exist now. Run targeted searches through Google Scholar, Perplexity, or whichever research tool you already use, on the specific niche you work in. This produces a second list of groups active in your exact area that were never on your radar. Call this the grey list: the names sitting just beyond the ones you already knew. Feed that list back through the same tools, ask what sits adjacent to it, and widen it again.

Pass three: filter hard. By the end of the first two passes, a researcher in a moderately active field is usually looking at somewhere around forty to fifty names. Now the filtering starts. Which of these groups have a working environment people genuinely speak well of? Which ones are growing rather than winding down? Which ones are doing work close enough to yours that a real conversation would have somewhere to go? That filter should leave you with ten to fifteen serious candidates, and from those, name the four or five you would actually want to spend the next three years working alongside, not merely be hired by.

If you are starting from even further back, building a research profile in a country with no lab access and no international contacts at all, the starting point looks different but the instinct is identical: the list comes first, and everything that matters follows from it.

The Visit Nobody Tells You You're Allowed to Make

Here is something almost nobody mentions to incoming researchers: in Germany, you are allowed to simply ask to visit a lab that interests you. Not apply for a position there. Not compete for a slot. Visit.

Most institutes and university departments run some form of public engagement or outreach activity, because building relationships with researchers who might join later is exactly the kind of long-horizon investment German research culture is built around. An email that says, plainly, "I am a funded researcher based in [city], working on [topic], and I would value the chance to visit your institute, meet your group, and see your facilities for a day," is not an imposition on anyone's time. It is precisely the kind of request these programmes exist to receive.

This works best in the months when the pressure is lower. Summer, in particular, when schedules loosen and people have more room for an unhurried conversation over coffee than for a meeting squeezed onto a packed calendar.

The aim of the visit is not to ask for a job. It is to be in the room. State plainly what you do. Ask plainly what they are doing. Let the conversation surface whatever it surfaces. Sometimes nothing does. Sometimes someone mentions, almost as an aside, that a colleague three buildings over is quietly trying to build a group in exactly the area you work in.

Start close to home before reaching further out. The people in your own city, in groups adjacent to yours, the ones you already see at seminars and have never quite spoken to, are the easiest version of this exercise, and the best practice for the harder ones. Buy the coffee. Spend the hour. Most of these conversations cost nothing, and several of them eventually turn into something that does.

Three Sentences. That's the Whole Email.

When a visit is not realistic, because of distance, timing, or simply too many names left on the list, there is the email. And the entire structure of a good one fits into three sentences.

Sentence one states who you are, what you do, and when you finish: "I am a PhD researcher in [field], finishing in [month/year], currently based at [institution]."

Sentence two shows you have actually looked at their work, specifically. Not "I admire your research." Every professor has read that line a thousand times and it tells them nothing. Name the actual project, the actual recent paper, the direction their group has visibly taken in the last year or two.

Sentence three makes the actual ask, and it is not a job. It is an opening: "I would value a short conversation about whether there might be room for collaboration, or whether you know of other groups doing related work who might be worth contacting."

Open with one line acknowledging their time, attach your CV, and stop. "I know your schedule is full. I will keep this short." That is the whole message. No second page, no list of achievements, no paragraph explaining your passion for the field.

Send this to enough names and your reply rate should land somewhere between forty and sixty percent, and that figure includes every kind of reply, including a flat no. A reply of any kind is a result you can act on. Silence is the only outcome worth chasing down, which is exactly what the follow-up is for.

If a week passes with nothing, send one line. Not a second pitch. Not the CV again. "I know you are busy. I wanted to check whether my last note reached you." One sentence. No attachment. Sent once.

Reading the Reply — Or the Silence

Every email lands in one of three categories, and most people misread at least one of them.

The row most people get wrong is the third one. In Germany, no reply does not mean no. It rarely means disinterest at all. More often it means the email arrived during a bad week, got mentally filed under "worth a proper reply," and then disappeared under the next forty things that landed on top of it. One follow-up, sent once, brings most of these back from "probably nothing" to active leads.

There is one more move worth knowing, for the moment someone redirects you toward a colleague. Use what you were told. "Professor [name] mentioned that your group might be exploring work in this direction, and that a short conversation could be worthwhile" opens a cold email on noticeably warmer ground than "I came across your work and wanted to reach out." You are not pretending to know them. You are using information that costs the person who shared it nothing, and is worth quite a lot to you.

This Is Not a Side Project

Here is the part almost everyone underestimates once the system itself is clear: this takes real, scheduled hours, and it has to be treated like the actual job it is, not the thing squeezed in after the real work of the day is done.

Think about the trade honestly. If you are willing to give eight hours a day to a lab that is, by your own account, not where your future sits, you can give two or three hours a day, every morning, to the work that decides what your future actually becomes. Measured against almost anything else you could do with that smaller block of time during these months, those two or three hours will do more for where you stand when your funding runs out than the other eight ever will.

Pick a window. Early morning, before the lab pulls your attention elsewhere, works for most people, because it is the one part of the day nobody else has a claim on yet. Block it. Treat it exactly the way you would treat a meeting you are not allowed to move. Do the list-building, the emails, the follow-ups, the visit planning, inside that window and only that window. Everything else can wait until it is done.

Run this properly, on a fixed schedule, for one month, and the leads start arriving within two to three weeks. Not because anything lucky happened. Because forty emails produce something like twenty replies, twenty replies produce several real conversations, and several real conversations is already more than most researchers generate across two full years of staying quiet and hoping.

Final Thought

None of this manufactures something out of nothing. It will not turn a thin research record into a strong one, or a weak thesis into a compelling one. What it does is put a genuinely strong record where the right people can actually see it, at the moment they are deciding who to call when something opens.

If you are funded, mid-thesis, and working in a field with active groups across Germany or Europe, you are very likely already in a stronger position than you currently believe. A funded international researcher, finishing on schedule, with a clear sense of direction, is not a common profile. The people who run these labs know exactly how uncommon it is. The only thing standing between that position and an actual conversation, most of the time, is whether anyone besides your supervisor has any idea you exist.

The work in front of you for these last months, then, is smaller and more concrete than "find a postdoc." It is this: make sure the people who would want to work with you know that you are looking, and know it early enough to do something about it. That part is entirely within your control. Start there.

If You Are Weighing the Bigger Decision Behind This One

Building a network answers "how do I find the next position." It does not answer the quieter question sitting underneath it, for many people, about whether to keep building a life in Germany or Europe at all once the PhD ends. The Hidden Cost of Life in Europe looks honestly at what that decision costs people who do not ask it loudly enough, early enough. And if the postdoc route itself is still an open question rather than a settled one, PhD or Industry? What Engineering Students in Germany Are Not Asking Themselves is the conversation worth having before this one.