Every year there are dozens of conferences, festivals, and forums for IT professionals around the world. It is immensely important to attend them for everybody who considers web development as a career. Below, you will find the main reasons why developers should attend conferences.
To study the environment and current reality
Any conferences and forums are primarily used as entry points to the professional environment. From this point of view, they are valuable both for beginners and professionals. A person gets an opportunity to look around, to see segment leaders and nearest competitors, to understand who is a significant figure on the market, to listen to whom, and to follow. Professionals interested in offering their services to someone can study potential clients and their level, requests, and sentiments.
In addition, conferences are a good way to assess the industry and market situation. This issue is touched on in one way or another in the presentations.
Doing networking
Professional events are always about communication, making new connections, maintaining old ones, and increasing your own recognition. The target audience, colleagues, and those who are one step above, whose experience is worth to be learned, can gather on one platform. A person gets into a community with the same interests, preferences, problems, and the more informal type of event, the easier it is to do networking. For this purpose, it is usually a combination of conference and festival or exhibition formats.
Conferences are worth attending in order to be on trend, to understand who and where is working and what projects are being launched. It is an excellent platform for hunting: people gather to show their best side, get themselves noticed, interest potential clients or partners, make a team, and find employees. It’s easier to do this in person than by phone or e-mail – it’s easier to interest, explain, convince, and find an approach.
International conferences provide even more abrupt networking and opportunities: as, for example, French Viva Technology that gathers 124 000 people and is especially valuable for startups – 3 000 investors come here. London Tech Week is no less attractive for young entrepreneurs, providing startups with a platform for contacts with corporations (including IBM and Intel), gas pedals, and investment communities from various industries. In general, international events are of interest foremost to those who are not only interested in global trends but also want to enter the international market and develop their project.
In 2020, the pandemic forced many conferences to temporarily go online, and here networking suffered. Offline conferences are more effective for it when people understand who is who and can actively get to know each other and present themselves. In the network, if we are talking about chat rooms in broadcasts, first you have a long time to understand who is hiding behind a nickname, what interests this person has, how to find a common thread and make friends, and how to exchange contacts in the general flow of rapidly appearing and leaving messages. If we consider online conferences, networking in groups set up on social networks for a particular event will be relatively effective: you can really make a good community there.
Build marketing
For a company or a startup, a conference is an excellent way to PR. Especially if there is an exhibition on the program, where you can buy a booth and hold a presentation of your product or service on it. This not only increases recognition of the company or specialist but also increases his expertise in a professional environment, especially if he will not only be at the booth but also will speak somewhere.
Large IT conferences are always attended by representatives of the media – the event is covered in print media and on television. This is a chance for any company to be featured in the conference results and thus increase the weight of its brand and become more attractive to potential partners and employees.