Conferences are not professional development

Have you ever used your professional development budget to attend a conference? Or to let someone on your team attend?

Conferences can be great. I used to run them - for the IAB, Jupiter, MediaPost and others. But they're NOT professional development.

At their best, they're a fertile ground for idea exchange. Speakers get to exchange ideas with each other, on stage. Many sessions are engineered to do exactly this. Attendees get to listen. Which is useful and maybe makes us see things differently. But it isn't professional development.

In the exhibit hall, vendors get to exchange information with prospective clients and the press. Attendees learn about new technologies and businesses that may eventually figure into their workflow. Instructive, but again - not professional development.

The networking is normally what justifies in-person attendance (and the requisite travel budget). But networking at most conferences is designed for people who want to sell (because they're paying for it), and the people who want to buy (because they're who the sellers are paying for). It's an important part of some jobs. But it too is not professional development.

Professional development is an activity that makes you better at your job by increasing your skills and capabilities. The tacit objective of most people on stage at a conference is not to make the attendees better at their jobs; it's to make the attendees see how good the speaker is at theirs.

Yes, some events are structured differently, designed to be more educational. Seminars and workshops. Sometimes these are embedded within a conference. So that attendees can have a little professional development, as a treat.

But even at its best, one-directional educational programming often fails to actually make people better at their jobs because it's not designed principally to be effective - it's designed to be efficient.

Programming and content don't allow for hands-on practice, repetitions, and real-time feedback. It's like trying to learn to hit a golf ball by watching YouTube videos.

I'm not telling you anything you don't know. But did you answer "yes" to the question at the top anyway? If you did, maybe what this industry needs is a better way to spend our professional development budgets. One designed to be effective, not efficient.