How to stay in touch with former colleagues after leaving a job
A practical approach to keeping a handful of former colleagues in your professional life: pick a small group, set a cadence, and find reasons to write that are not requests.
THE SHORT ANSWER
Choose a short list of former colleagues you genuinely want to keep, set a light cadence you can actually sustain, and write to them with news or encouragement rather than a favor to ask.
Pick a small, deliberate group
Leaving a job produces a long list of people you liked working with, but trying to maintain all of them at once tends to dilute the effort into nothing. Ping's editorial suggestion is to choose a short list, perhaps five or six former colleagues whose work or company you genuinely want to keep track of, and treat that list as the group you invest in first.
According to Harvard FAS Mignone Center for Career Success, people are more likely to help someone they know and trust, which is part of why a smaller, well-tended group of former colleagues can matter more over time than a wide but shallow one. A fictional example: someone leaving a design team might keep in closer touch with the two teammates they collaborated with most closely, rather than everyone on a twelve-person roster.
Sources: Harvard FAS Mignone Center for Career Success: Maximizing Your Network for Job Opportunities
Choose a natural cadence
A cadence only works if it fits how you actually live, so Ping's editorial checklist suggests picking an interval you can sustain without a calendar reminder feeling like a chore, such as a note near a shared milestone or every few months. Overpromising a monthly check-in and quietly abandoning it can feel worse to a former colleague than an honest, looser rhythm.
UC Berkeley Career Engagement describes networking as fundamentally a 'career conversation' to gather and share information, which is a useful frame for former-colleague contact too: each message can be a small update exchange rather than a formal ask. A fictional example: someone might send a short note after a former colleague's company appears in industry news, simply to say they noticed and are glad to see it.
Reasons to write that are not requests
The easiest way to keep a relationship warm is to make contact valuable on its own, not just a setup for a future ask. Ping's editorial suggestion is to default to sharing something useful, congratulating a visible win, or simply asking how a project turned out, since these messages don't obligate a reply the way a favor-driven note does.
Harvard FAS Mignone Center for Career Success guidance on building a network of professional connections points to steady, low-stakes contact as part of what keeps relationships useful over years rather than months. A fictional example: a former colleague's conference talk getting posted online could be a natural, low-pressure reason to send a short congratulatory message with no ask attached.
Sources and editorial notes
Reviewed September 29, 2026. Frames post-departure contact as a deliberate small-list habit rather than a mass reconnection effort, pairing a fixed cadence with non-transactional reasons to write.