Need some help making the case to attend COLLABORATE 12? See the documents, below, to help you justify your attendence. Also, see the list of ways you can make the most out of a conference.

JD Edwards Letter to Manager >

PeopleSoft Letter to Manager >

These days it’s harder for folks to justify attending conferences. Here are a few suggestions that might help towards making the case.

• You are an asset to your company. All assets require maintenance and enhancements. If instead of being a person, you were a piece of machinery, part of the corporate budget would go towards maintaining and upgrading you. You are an asset to the company. They should be investing the same percentage of budget towards maintaining and upgrading your skills as they do for the rest of the corporate assets.
• Offer to train others in what you learned when you return. You can pitch your trip to a conference as a way to bring back skills and knowledge to the rest of the organization. If you have any experience in training or teaching, you can use that as your justification to attend instead of other co-workers. Get extra copies of the tutorial notes from other sessions. Plus, this year we will be recording the hottest sessions and making them available to COLLABORATE attendees.
• Trip report. Arguably one form of teaching others, the trip report is a write up of the sessions you attended, written for other folks in your group. The best trip reports make it easy for folks to dig up the right reference, or trigger people to come ask you questions. There’s rarely much value in 10 page trip report documents: no one reads them. Instead, a 2 or 3 page summary, with URLs and pointers to stuff for specific questions gets much more mileage.
• Connect the value of the conference to business goals. If ease of use or customer satisfaction are company or division goals, sending folks to conferences on those subjects will help pull in more expertise and knowledge towards helping the business. This argument puts less of the focus on your professional goals, and more on the company.
• Recruiting. One of the reasons to send people to conferences is to recruit for open positions. If your team has had trouble filling certain jobs, or know that new openings are coming for your group, you can offer to do recruiting work while you’re there. COLLABORATE’s networking opportunities are unbeatable; you are attending sessions broken down into the specific products and modules you use and therefore are surrounded by qualified individuals.
• Professional development. If you have career discussions with you manager, tie your career goals and future development to specific kinds of training or growth opportunities that you need. This year at COLLABORATE, we have an entire professional development track of education that could tie into your career path directly. In some organizations, folks will get to go to conferences provided they are presenting or participating in a session. While this year’s call for presentation is already closed, you can look for COLLABORATE 13 call for presentations to open in the summer of 2012. Also, keep an eye out for the call for presentations for our new product-focused events in 2012.