I know some very underqualified poor performers who also appear to be excellent networkers. I have yet to see them however, get promotions internally based on networking alone.
Trying to get internally promoted is a losing strategy. If you’re trying to develop your career, then all you want is for your next role to be better (and probably pay more) than your last role. Exclusively looking inside your current organisation for that next role is simply limiting your options to some tiny subset of all the potentially good options on the market.
You just want to turn yourself into a good candidate for that next role, you shouldn’t care where you find it. Even if you’re successful at getting internally promoted, there’s a good chance you’re going to accomplish those goals slower than if you’d just looked elsewhere.
