A guide to attending conferences and getting the most out of them when you go back to your daily usual.
Step 1…YES! You should go!
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to attend a Product-Led Summit hosted by The Product-Led Alliance. This organization hosts many conferences and summits all over the world, this one was in Austin. It was my first time traveling without my team and attending a conference like this on my own. Leading up to it, I was pretty nervous and didn’t know what to expect. Afterwards, I’m so grateful I stepped out of my normal routine and went. The experience was incredible and yielded two jam packed days of insightful speakers and rich conversation.
I got back on the plane to Baltimore early Saturday morning feeling energized and renewed, eager to share my learnings with my team, use some of the tools that were featured, and apply new mindsets to our own product development efforts. I had a host of new LinkedIn connections and my feed was newly full of inspiring posts from speakers who had just sort of blown my mind in the 48 hours preceding.
Now, a week later, I’m reflecting on the whole in-person conference experience. We didn’t even have the option for so long, and now people seem to be flocking to hotels, convention centers and speaker halls to reconnect and to learn from each other. It’s an amazing thing. Sure, the level of energized that I felt immediately after the conference dissipates a bit with each passing day, but that being said, it’s on me to keep it going.
Step 2…Keep it going!
From meeting with colleagues to share resources to connecting with CEOs on LinkedIn to signing up for free trials of new software, it’s up to me to incorporate the electric atmosphere of a conference into my day-to-day flow. But how do I do that? Anyone who attends a conference faces the challenge of capturing that lightning in a bottle and drawing from it whenever the daily grind lulls you back into your comfort zone. It has me thinking about HOW you keep the momentum from a conference going. Here are some things I have come up with as well as some steps to take DURING the conference to enable these post-conference activities.
Engage your Network
During the conference:
make note of speakers you want to connect with and if you have time send them an invitation on LinkedIn with a reference to something from their talk that resonated with you
engage with people in the audience before and after sessions to find other people to add to your network
during any interactive times, talk about how you will apply what you learned to your day to day and seek to understand how other conference attendees will do the same
if you can bubble up their perspective on work issues you may have or vice versa try to do so
Immediately after the conference
thank speakers for the talks and try to include a note about what you loved about their talk or a question their talk may have sparked in you
message a few closer connections about how much you enjoyed spending time with them or something you learned from them
In the following weeks
schedule a virtual coffee with someone you met
send a LinkedIn message to someone you may have chatted with during the conference to check in on something you discussed with them during the conference
Materials
During the conference:
Take notes! Even if the slides and recordings will be shared out, take notes of the things that leap out at you during each session
Immediately after the conference:
If you have the ability to access the conference materials after the fact, be sure to do that and store them somewhere that will allow you to access them later
Share information from the conference with coworkers. This can take many different forms depending on your working model and the culture of your workplace
Write a blog about your experience and publish it (either internally to your company or externally if you have something like that set up)
List out “one-liner” highlights from the conference and post them in a central location (physically or digitally)
In the following weeks:
Assemble resources shared from the conference in a shared google drive. If some content made you think of a specific person who would benefit from it, don’t be shy about directing them to the exact talk, resource, etc. AND offer to talk about it with them
Coordinate a lunch and learn or a brown bag to share information you learned from the conference with your team, department, organization, etc.
Try to apply one new thing you learned each week as best you can
Refresh yourself on your favorite moments from the conference by reviewing your notes, speakers’ videos or presentations
New Tools
Conferences inevitably have sponsors which means that any conference attendee will leave with armfuls of SWAG and a brain-full of new tools to make work easier. Each sponsor likely has a new tool that they are advocating for and many speakers will offer tools as part of their talk.
Step 3…ABL: Always Be Learning!
Whatever your motivation for attending a conference, your mindset whilst there and afterwords has a lot to do with how much you will get out of it. Approaching a conference with the attitude of “How much can I learn here?” will yield much more powerful and lasting results than one of “ugh, I don’t feel like doing this!”. This also applies in the days, weeks and months following a conference. There are many small things you can do with regularity that can help you develop or strengthen your learning mindset. Here are a few that I find helpful:
Seek out further learning on topics that resonated with you from a recent conference or other learning opportunity
Set aside 10-30 minutes a day to read something that can strengthen a burgeoning skill
Enroll in a self-paced class or workshop (there are SO MANY free ones) and slowly chip away at it by blocking a little calendar time each week
Pick a topic you know nothing about but are curious about and learn one new thing about it each week
Remember, being a lifelong learner takes intentionality once we are out of formal schooling. Often our days seem so busy and our schedules so jam-packed, that our learning experiences are quickly regulated to those that are NECESSARY as opposed to JOYFUL. Both have their place, but a combination of the two is a great way to cultivate a deep passion for learning and by extension, work.
