A Day with Dan Cederholm… And How to Pimp Yourself out to Your Company
Ah, to remember the excitement when I was alerted via my feedreader that Dan Cederholm was giving a daylong session in Boston…
Okay, everyone knows that Dan is my “web design superhero”, but I’ve been dying to get to a Carson Workshop for like… ever. They have a ton of them overseas and in San Francisco, but the combination of a Carson Workshop… In Boston… featuring Dan Cederholm was too much to pass up.
So, I immediately wrote an email to my entire company telling them about the session and what the benefits would be of me going. And then I asked for money. See, I need to find projects to fund me to go to such things (like WebVisions). Luckily, the funding came through, because I had gone ahead and booked it anyway (hey, there’s only 40 seats at this thing). I offered project managers whatever they needed in return—a report, code samples, and even eight hours of clapping erasers.
This brings me to another topic that is related. I have started sending out emails with “Adam the Aptima Scout” in the subject line. My company likes to see everyone go to a conference or a seminar every year for professional development. But with everything that’s going on in the web community, one is just not enough. So, I’ve been aggressively persuing funding to go to more. Call it personal marketing. I’ve already identified at least three conferences I want to go to next year (SXSW, @media, and WebVisions).
A month or so ago, I sent out my first scouting offer, for Refresh ‘06. I was interested in that one because Paul Boag, Andy Budd, Cameron Moll, Jeremy Keith, and many others I’d love to see are going to be there. There was a bit of interest in sending me to that one, but whereas it is pretty much all Web Standards, it was a pretty small group of project candidates.
Luckily, Cederholm’s session is just one day (no hotel stays needed), in Boston (can take the T, no planes), and is relatively inexpensive ($495). So, this has been my first success in my “Adam the Aptima Scout” approach. I’ll try it again next with SXSW. That’s a bigger conference with much more diverse panels, so hopefully that will help me get multiple projects interested in order to cover costs like flight and hotel.
Anyway, you can expect me to blog all about the session with Dan. It’s November 2… and I can’t wait!
Nice. I take a similar approach where I print out conference itineraries and drop them on the desks of co-workers whom I think might be interested. Over time, I dropped a couple on my boss’ desk that he ended up attending. So, when the time came to ask him about one I was interested (Webvisions 06), he was a much easier sell.
Have fun in Boston. Tell Dan I said, “Cheers!”
Matthew, I most certainly will tell Dan.
It seems that some find conferences as an inconvenience that they are required to go to. Well, I can’t say I like the travel (being a still-new dad), but finding such highly concentrated opportunities for explanding my own boundaries (and then subsequently, the company’s) is highly rewarding to me.
Glad to see someone else taking a similar approach. People just loooove initiative!