At CookiesHQ we understand the importance of brushing up on your skills on a regular basis, keeping up-to-date with your industry and broadening your horizons. This is why we try to encourage our staff to attend local meet ups or events, and we send them off to conferences once or twice a year.
Such events are usually the right place to build up motivation, find inspiration and make new connections. Besides, spending a few days out of the office is rather good for the team morale and it allows team members to spend some time together outside of office hours. A win on all fronts!
Our dev are all specialised in Ruby/Rails web development, finding events related to their line of work is pretty easy. They basically jump from one web dev conference to another. In the past few years, they attended the WDC in Bristol, Brighton Ruby, Port80 in Newport, Baruco in Barcelona and Bath Ruby (which we are sponsoring this year again!).
Gemma and I have been to UX Bristol a couple of times, which we loved, but we struggle to find events that are relevant to our roles, i.e. a mix of project planning, project management, account management and QA.
So this year, we’ve decided to give a go to Oxford Smashing Conference, which happens to be next month (come say hi if you’re attending too!).
One day I would also love to make it to one of the Happy Startup School’s camp, but so far the timing has just never been right.
I’m curious to know though, do you send your staff off to conferences? Which ones would you recommend?
Picture ‘Magdalen College, Oxford’ by Ed Webster, used under CC BY 2.0 license.
