You’ve convinced your boss to let you attend the conference, you’ve booked your travel, and mapped out the sessions you want to attend. However, there is more you can do to prepare yourself for an amazing and meaningful conference experience.
First of all, is anyone else from your organization attending? If so, get together head of time and make sure you cover all the sessions that you think you’d benefit from and those that your organization will benefit from. Try not to attend the same sessions-you’ll cover more ground if you split up.
If no one else from your organization is attending, then you are your organizations delegate and you’d do well to bring back as much knowledge as possible (no pressure!) Meet with your team ahead of time and find out what sessions they might want you to attend—even if it isn’t one that you’d have chosen on your own.
Onsite, you’ll want to take really good notes that you can share with your team when you return. Even better would be to summarize the day listing out all your “Aha” moments in an email back to the team so you that you don’t forget what you learned and so they can start implementing the new ideas right away.
Don’t forget that you’ll be provided with all of the papers for all of the sessions, so you’ll have a wealth of resources to bring home with you and review—share this with your team as well.
Once you return from the conference you’ll be hit with a full inbox and lots of work to catch up on. That being said, you’d do well to set aside some time to meet with your team so you can review in person the “Aha’s” you came away with and to start working through ways that you can implement the knowledge you gained in St. Louis at your organization. Don’t let al that good information go to waste!
Finally, start gearing up for next year’s conference—maybe you’ll even want to submit a paper of your own so you can share your best practices with next year’s attendees!
Maureen Gribble
SMRP
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment