Two weeks ago I attended a conference (Megacomm 2012) that was aimed at both marketing and technical communicators. This was a whole day event and it got me thinking about the validity of this sort of bonus day out. Is it worth the cost to a company to finance their employees going to these conferences or is it a waste of their money. The said employee gets a chance to network, which in and of itself is a double-edged sword. He is as likely to gain something useful for his company as he is to find a new company.
I expect to gain very little in the way of new information, although sometimes it is useful to hear the “bleeding obvious” stated by someone else. On the other hand, I have a few years under my belt working for different companies, using different methodologies etc. so I regard myself as fairly savvy about the world in which I work. Others, with a smidgen less experience can gain quite a lot in the way of ideas – how others do things, confidence – they are not the only ones fighting with Microsoft Word numbering, specific problem resolution – assuming there are things that you find problematic, and of course lots of weight gain – the food at these events is (nearly) always better than the fare otherwise consumed in the workplace.
This conference lived up to all my expectations. Of the four sessions I attended, one dealt with documentation – becoming more efficient, one with training – converting documentation to courseware, one dealt with marketing analytics and one was a self-treat – how to best maximize free use of LinkedIn. My favourite was the training session, since it was so bad it ended up as funny. For example, during the session, someone asked a question to which the lecturer replied that all questions should wait until the end. Two slides later this same lecturer stated that a good presentation has to engage the participants via interactive questions and answers. Go figure.
The session outlining how to make the documentation process more efficient added nothing new to what I am already doing, but was extremely well presented and covered so many of the bases that it must have been brilliant to the less experienced. And even I need reminding of the “bleeding obvious” from time to time. This was definitely worth the time.
More and more documentation is being supplied in new formats, like YouTube videos or interactive wikis. Training is now often done via webinars instead of via a frontal course. So the marketing lecture on using analytics to see how well received your product/website/whatever is received by the outside world has a very practicable overlap with documentation trends.
All in all, it was a nice day out.
It used to be that I was against sending any of my employees to these things because of the lack of anything useful that could then be utilized in their daily slog. Now I realize that this type of bonus day out is exactly that. It doesn’t have to have a payback, but it is something that the employee wants and is thankful for, potentially increasing loyalty to the company and also giving an incentive to work better in the future.
So the overall verdict? A very acceptable waste of time, that does pay out dividends – go for it.
The Write Way 