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The Professional Network turns your member list into a searchable directory of what people actually do: a headline, an industry, optionally a job title and an area of expertise, and the company they work for. Members browse it by industry or by keyword and send each other connection requests. Built for business networks, alumni associations, chambers of commerce, and any community whose members want to find each other by expertise. Replaces a spreadsheet of “who knows about what” and a separate LinkedIn group. Professional network page with the interests and industry lists in the left column, each row showing its member count, next to a grid of member cards with name and profession headline

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How to access

The directory lives at /professional-network. It is not in Orgo’s default sidebar, so add a Professional network item through the Menu Organizer. Clicking an industry on someone’s profile also lands here, pre-filtered. Being signed in is the only requirement, subject to Who can see whom. Admins configure it under Settings → Modules → Professions, which requires ADMIN_TENANT.

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Turning it on

Four switches, saved the moment you flip one. Professions module settings with the master Enable Professions Module switch and a Professional Information section holding Enable Industry Tracking, Enable Job Information and Enable Expertise Headline, sector and the current-organisation fields are not switches here. They are rows on the profile form.

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What members fill in

The Profession tab on a profile shows only the fields you have enabled. Members edit their own; an admin needs ADMIN_LOCAL or higher over that member. Profession tab of a member profile with profession headline, job and expertise pickers, industry, a public private non-governmental sector choice and a Current profession card
The billing fields on the same tab (company identifier, legal name, address, commerce registry number) are for invoicing, not for the directory. See Companies.
The three company fields are shown as one Current profession block, and that block is keyed to Current company/organization name. If you remove that field from the profile form, the website and role fields disappear with it even while they are still selected. Keep the name field on the form whenever you want either of the other two.

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Browsing the directory

Unfiltered, the directory lists every active member with a profession headline, newest profession update first. Your own card comes first, carrying Add profession and Add industry prompts while yours is empty. Cards show photo, name, user type, headline, industry, a supporter badge if the member subscribed to your support product, and a LinkedIn icon when their LinkedIn URL is set. Three filters, which combine:

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Managing the industry catalogue

Settings → Modules → Professions → Profession Industries, visible only while Enable Industry Tracking is on, lists roughly 148 industries Orgo ships globally plus any you add. Industries admin table with Industry Name, type tagged Custom or Global, an enabled checkbox per row, and bulk buttons for enabling or disabling all custom and all default industries Unticking hides an industry without deleting it, and members who already picked it keep the value. Disable All Default clears the shipped list at once, the usual start for a short bespoke list. Create Industry takes a name plus optional translations per interface language; custom industries are tagged Custom, belong only to your organisation, and are the only ones you can rename or delete. The job and expertise catalogues are read-only global reference data: you cannot add to them or hide entries.
Every write on this screen, creating, renaming, deleting and the bulk enable and disable buttons, is refused unless your account carries the tenant administrator role. An admin who holds ADMIN_TENANT as a permission rather than as the role can open the screen and read the list, and gets Access Denied on the buttons.

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Connections

Connections have their own switch, Settings → Modules → Users & Profiles → Profile Settings → Has Connections, on by default and working whether or not the Professions module is on.
1

One member sends the request

Connect on the other member’s profile, or on a Discover members card. The button is only there when the other account is active, you are not already connected, neither of you has a request pending with the other, and you are not inside a cooldown.
2

The recipient is told

They get an in-app notification and an email. Only they can respond: the sender’s button becomes Request pending and does nothing until they do.
3

They accept or decline

From the profile, or from Requests received on the Connections tab of their own profile, which carries a dot while anything is waiting. Accepting notifies and emails the sender; declining tells them nothing.
4

The connection appears for both

Under accepted connections on each side, searchable and sortable by most recent, least recent or name, and counted on the tab.
Either side can remove an accepted connection later. That deletes it outright, with no notification to the other person, and either of them can send a fresh request afterwards. Two server-side limits apply.
  • 20 connection requests per hour per member. The 21st is refused until the hour is up.
  • A 21 day cooldown, which starts when a pending request is cancelled, not when one is declined. A member who sends a request and then withdraws it cannot ask that person again for three weeks. A member whose request was declined can ask again immediately, and the declining party is never told either way.
Requests to accounts that are not active are refused outright. My Network tab on your own profile listing accepted connections as rows with a count, a search box and a sort dropdown

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Discover members

User Recommendations, on the same Profile Settings screen, gives members a Discover members carousel of suggested people, also placeable on the dashboard as a widget. Suggestions score out of 150 points across five signals: Excluded: members already connected, already asked, in a decline cooldown, under 18, or with a private profile. At most 50 suggestions are produced, cached for 48 hours and refreshed sooner when a connection is sent or accepted.
Recommendations are deliberately not based on profession. Industry, expertise, job title and the interest custom field play no part in the score, so filling the professional profile in will not change who a member is shown.

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Who can see whom

Individual privacy. Each member has a Profession & social media toggle in their privacy settings. Set to admin-only, it blanks their headline and industry for everyone except tenant admins, HR staff, and staff in their own local center. The organisation-wide default is Settings → Modules → Users & Profiles → Privacy Defaults. Signed-out visitors never see profession data. See Privacy Settings. Directory visibility. Who Can See Members in General Groups, under Privacy & Visibility in the same module, applies here too. Raised above ordinary members, plain members can still browse and filter by industry, but keyword and interest filters are refused and recommendations fall back to their own local center.

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Common questions

The unfiltered directory lists only members who have a Profession headline and status Active. Industry, job title and expertise on their own do not put anyone in the list, which is the usual cause: the member filled in the pickers and skipped the free-text line.A useful way to confirm it: filter by their industry. The industry filter drops the headline requirement, so someone who appears under their industry but not in the unfiltered list is missing a headline and nothing else.
The tab renders only when there is something to put on it. It needs Enable Professions Module on, plus at least one available field, which can come either from the module switches (industry, job, expertise) or from the profile form (headline, sector, the current organisation fields).Switching the module on while every field is off leaves the tab empty and hidden. Check the profile form as well as the module screen.
That is Who Can See Members in General Groups, under Privacy & Visibility, set above ordinary members. The rule is about which member lists a plain member is allowed to pull, not about the professional network as such, and it hits the keyword and interest filters because those ask for a list of members with no group or industry attached.Two things still work for those members: browsing unfiltered and filtering by industry. So the practical workaround is to pick an industry first and then type in the search box, since the request then carries the industry and is allowed. Guests are refused in every case.
The button is hidden rather than disabled, so its absence is the error message. It means one of:
  • Has Connections is off for the organisation;
  • the other account is not Active;
  • a request is already pending in one direction or the other;
  • the two are already connected;
  • the member cancelled an earlier request to this person and the 21 day cooldown is still running.
Only the last one expires on its own.
The interface shows one generic toast for every refusal, so read it as “the server said no” and work through the four possible reasons: the sender has sent 20 requests in the last hour, the sender is in a cooldown with that person, the recipient’s account is not Active, or the recipient has already sent them a request that is waiting to be accepted.The last one is the most common and the least obvious: the member should look at Requests received on their own My Network tab, where the person they were trying to reach is probably already waiting.
A decline does not block anything. If the recipient used Decline, the sender can ask again straight away.What does block for 21 days is cancelling your own pending request. If the member withdrew the request rather than being declined, the cooldown is running and the Connect button stays hidden until it expires. So the question to ask is not “were they declined” but “did they cancel”.
Suggestions are cached for 48 hours per member, and only rebuilt earlier when that member sends or accepts a connection. Nothing else refreshes them, so a member who fills in their profile and reloads sees the same list.Also check what the score is actually made of: location, age proximity, how recently the person joined, mutual connections and recent logins. Profession plays no part, so telling members to complete their professional profile in order to get better suggestions is not true. Members who are already connected, already asked, in a cooldown, under 18 or on a private profile are excluded entirely, which is why a small or young organisation can run out of suggestions long before the 50-suggestion ceiling.
Expected. Unticking an industry removes it from the pickers and from the directory’s industry list, but the value stays on the member records that already had it. Cards resolve the name from the enabled list, so those members show an empty industry line rather than the old name.Tick it back on to make the name reappear, or edit those members onto an industry you kept. Deleting is only possible for industries you created yourself, which is the safer reason to disable rather than delete.
Skills are separate: Enable Skills Field, on the same Profile Settings screen, adds a Skills custom field seeded with a predefined catalogue. It is not part of the Professions module and does not appear in the directory filters, so use expertise if you want people to be findable by it here.