No soup for you in 2009
Steve'Do you have budgeted funds available to attend HR conferences in 2009?';)
Last week Jason Averbook of Knowledge Infusion took an informal survey of HR professionals on Twitter asking that simple question.
The results were astoundingly one-sided, 18 respondents said 'No', 2 said 'Depends', and only 1 said 'Yes'. Looks like there could be many conference meeting rooms going empty this year.
Last month the Gartner Group announced the cancellation of several IT conferences, including its 'flagship' event, the Spring Symposium/IT Expo in Las Vegas.
Many confererences will still go on of course, but with greatly reduced attendance, and more vendors and consultants chasing fewer and fewer potential customers.
What if anything should replace these opportunities for HR professionals, and the vendors or consultants that attempt to leverage the events to generate leads and close deals? One option for the HR pro and student are the numerous webcasts offered by HR.com, the Human Capital Institute, and ma
Flickr - Jim Frazierny of the vendors and consultancies as well. These webcasts are usually free, they cover a wide range of HR-related topics, and run so frequently, that pretty much every day of the business week you can find one to attend.
In fact, I will be presenting two webcast in the next few months, one on February 25 with HR.com titled 'Understand your workforce today, so you can plan for tomorrow' - details here; and one on May 14 with HCI titled, 'Tell the Hiring Story with Technology' - information here.
But webcasts are not the same as conferences, the ability to connect and network is missing, the ability to get immersed for a few days with like-minded folks, and easy access to experts and leaders in the field can't easily be replicated over the web.
I think there is some opportunity to develop a more informal, grass-roots style alternative to traditional conferences which no one can afford to attend, and webcasts that are really one dimensional and have limited utility. I have been kicking around some ideas with some Twitter friends on this, and hope to try some of these ideas very soon.
What ideas do you suggest to replace the gap created by the lack of conference attendance in 2009?
Reader Comments (2)
We can attend national conferences IF we are presenting. We can attend regional and local conferences - we find those to be much less expensive and sometimes just as useful. The only thing missing is the $$ keynote.
I agree with you on that point Maven, there may be much better opportunities for development at the local level. I think quite honestly there is also the opportunity to harness and leverage the ad-hoc and virtual networks that are forming via blogs, blogging communities, and on Twitter. Thanks for your thoughts.