I recently had lunch with my boss to pitch him (yet again) for PASS. He does not make the actual decision, but if he feels it is worthy, he sends it up the management chain. He sees the value and always sends it up, but it never makes it through. During our conversation he mentioned something that sent up a red flag for me. I found it very interesting and those trying to get their employers to send them to PASS might want to know this inside tip about “large corporation mentality”. Here is what he said:
“They (upper management) almost always turn down travel for conferences, because they are not considered training.”
Well isn’t that Special?
To be honest, he has a point. I’ve seen plenty of people at conferences that are just there to get out of work. I have even seen people not show up at the conference at all. Unfortunately this seems to have given employers a bad view of conferences in general. I have never been able to attend a PASS Summit, but I know a lot of people that have attended. That being said, I think you would be hard pressed to not classify it as training. You obviously cannot consider the pre and post conference sessions to not be training. When the two things are combined you get 2 days of dedicated training followed by 3 days of specialized break-out training.
If you find yourself in this boat, then my first suggestion is to read Jeremiah Peschka’s(Blog|Twitter) post on Getting to PASS on the Cheap. My second suggestion is to pitch the PASS Summit to your employer as a training class of 2 dedicated class days and 3 days of break-out sessions based on particular SQL Server features. Here is part of the email I sent to my boss that more accurately explains what the PASS Summit provides, translated into acceptable corporate terms.
There is a training opportunity called the PASS Summit in Seattle, WA the week of October 10th, 2011. I am a member of PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) as well as on the board of directors for the local NTSSUG (North Texas SQL Server User Group) chapter of PASS. Every year PASS holds a national training conference where the best and brightest SQL server minds come together to teach highly technical sessions. This is not a conference but actual training sessions. The first two days are full training sessions with a dedicated instructor and the last days are break-out sessions. The advantage of the break-out sessions is that there are several concentrations of expertise within SQL server and it allows you to choose the instructor who is an expert in your area of concentration. These instructors include Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) as well as Microsoft employees right from their headquarters in Redmond. These instructors are the people who wrote SQL itself, members of the Microsoft product team, members of the Microsoft technical support team, and the people who write all the technical books. There is nowhere else you can get training from these instructors.
I’m crossing my fingers that the terminology gap has been crossed and I will have more success this year in my company realizing the true value of the PASS Summit. It might be worth PASS marketing the Summit more toward training than a conference to bridge this gap, but I’m not sure how many other companies view conferences the same way as mine.
Great post Ryan! I hope that you will be able to show your boss and uppers the value of the conf.
Great idea. If your PASS chapter has a copy of the DVDs from previous summits, perhaps showing some of them to your manager would help to convince him as well.
Excellent point Ryan, and well-written letter. I would like to think that will break through the cloudy thinking. If you need additional follow-up material, there are a number of bloggers who have written posts along the subjects of “what I learned at PASS Summit”. In fact that was a specific topic that PASS promoted people to write out earlier this year to help people get to the 2010 Summit.
I hope to see you at the Summit in 2011!