Build Lasting Relationships

In-person conferences, or even sometimes virtual conferences, can be used to advance your career. Although online relationships can help advance your career, nothing beats in-person contact. In-person events and conferences can connect you to important people and companies, and create a deeper engagement with your network. This chapter will show you the steps to add conferences to your career-building toolkit.

Here’s what we’ll specifically cover in this chapter:

• How conferences can boost your career
• Finding the best conferences to attend
• Time and money – making your attendance worthwhile
• Making conference attendance an asset for your boss and your company
• Goal stacking – how to guarantee results while attending a conference

Let’s begin!

How conferences can boost your career

Conferences can boost your career through deep and long-lasting relationships. So, how do you form these relationships? You network with recruiters and engineers from companies you want to work for in the future while you attend conferences. You may be surprised to find that job offers can result from your efforts to engage with people at conferences. These interactions can form the basis for relationships that may result in opportunities for career opportunities – maybe not now but, more likely, in the future. Most job offers are a result of an introduction via a connection in your network. You may be able to apply for jobs in the future based on some of these interactions. Conferences are a great opportunity to improve your networking skills. Take the time to practice your skills by considering some alternative responses to common and expected questions. You can do this via conversation framing by asking questions, instead of being the...

Finding the best conferences to attend

How do you find the right conferences to attend? Most likely, you have discovered conferences in your area of expertise from co-workers, colleagues, and the internet. Research those conferences by looking at their websites and social media presence. Look at their agendas and review some of the sessions from preview editions. Evaluate the quality of the speakers, the content, and the recordings. You should also review the social media posts from previous editions of the event. Ask members of your team at work and members of any meetups or user groups you attend to share their conference experiences as well. One trend in event organization is that events are becoming smaller and much more focused locally and regionally. There may be one flagship event and then several regional or local events in various regions, based on the main flagship event. You don’t need to wait to attend the biggest, most international event in your field. You can...

Time and money – making your attendance worthwhile

There is a cost to attend conferences. How do you make the costs of both your time and money worth the investment? The word investment is intentionally selected here because it is an investment in yourself. It costs you both your time and money – travel costs, food and beverage costs, and potentially, time you could be billing for compensation at an hourly rate. There are some best practices for attending conferences that will help you to make your attendance worthwhile.

When you are attending conferences, introduce yourself to others – this is the best way to get something out of the experience. When you introduce yourself, remember to be authentic. Be yourself in personality and appearance. Ask for their contact information and social media details. Make sure to follow up with a message, and be specific with your follow-up.

Review the conference schedule in advance – sketch out a flexible schedule...

Making conference attendance an asset for your boss and your company

In many cases, you are not the only one who is investing time and money for you to attend conferences. If you are employed (unless you are self-employed or an independent contractor), you are also asking your boss and your employer to make an investment in you via time and money. How do you make your conference attendance an asset for your boss and your company? In addition to the steps we outlined in the previous section, you will want to plan your conference selections and attendance based on how your employer will benefit from the experience, not just how you, personally, will benefit.

You can view the conference keeping in mind how the content you learn will benefit any projects you work on for your employer. This can be a project you work on with your team, a project by another team, or a cross-organizational project. Bringing back the knowledge you learn and applying it to either your team or another team...

Goal stacking – how to guarantee results while attending a conference

If you want to guarantee success and results while attending a conference, get specific about your goals. Even better, be SMARTER about your goals. Make these kinds of goals for each conference you attend (and use this model in general as well). Review your goals before, during, and after your conference experience. If you can dream it and draft goals around it, you can achieve it. Make at least three goals for each conference you attend. They can be in various categories – learning, networking, project-based, for personal professional development, or for the benefit of your employer. They can be aspirational to achieve a new position or become a speaker or mentor. Articulate what it is that you intend to achieve. What are your intentions with this experience? You can guarantee your results if you put your mind to achieving the goals set.

For example, here are three goals when attending your next...

Interview

Ixchel Ruiz

Q: Ixchel Ruiz is a developer advocate at JFrog. She’s highly active in the Java developer community and has some excellent stories to share with us about her conference experiences and her career path from developer and consultant to developer advocate. Welcome, Ixchel.

A: Hi, Heather. Thank you very much for having me. I’m super excited about being here with you.

Q: Your stories and your career journey fit so nicely into this particular season. It’s serendipitously happened that your story is a perfect fit to talk about this book, how you’ve managed to shape it the way that you wanted it to be, and how the experiences that you’ve had participating in the community have helped to bring you to where you are today.

Let’s just start with you sharing the story of how that happened, and then I can ask you a few questions about it.

A: Sure. But before we start, I wanted to show you how interesting is this. I...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to add conferences to your career-building plans, how to select conferences for the best results, how to make a plan for this effort, how to engage with your employer to bring their support to this activity, and how to achieve the maximum benefits from engaging in-person conferences.

In the next part of the book, we will show you how to create an impact by sharing and leading. We will start with how to build trust with top developers to solve important problems by joining open source projects.