At their best, you get whisked off to cool locations like Las Vegas and New Orleans. At their worst, they are down the street from where you work, and you have to come back to the office in time for a 4:00 staff meeting.

Cool locations aside, with proper planning, a technical conference can be of real value to you, your staff, and your company. This planning is divided into two parts; picking the right conference, and budgeting your time once there.

Regarding picking the right conference, consider the following . . .

There is an old expression that says, “People should work to live, not live to work.” That said, upon occasion, and within certain bounds, you should allow an employee’s personal life to take precedent over their job. The concept here is that if you have a good employee who is working through a difficult family, personal or health issue, you should help them out.

Assisting an employee at their time of need has the following benefits . . .

Question: As a technical IT manager, do I really need to take classes on soft skills like active listening and interviewing? I hate that stuff, aren’t I better off learning something new technically?

Ok, I admit it. I was the biggest offender of the advice I am suggesting to you here.

As an individual contributor, I never took soft skills classes. I loved training, but if I couldn’t pick up an additional technical tip or two I wasn’t interested.

For many years, if I had the choice between Oracle Database Internals, Advanced Techniques in Function Overloading, or Active Listening, guess which two courses I took? Well, I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t Active Listening or other soft skills related classes. I’m really glad I took the hard skills classes, the technical information I learned helped me grow as a technical professional.

In retrospect, however . . .