Category: How To’s

–

I’m writing this from a couple of different perspectives about attending conferences.

• Cisco Live – This is written based on Cisco Live events but is useful for any vendor / technology (or even other industry/profession) conferences.
• First time attendee / non social person
• On-site attendee
• Remote attendee

I’m going to try and mold these elements together with the obvious point that there are things in person that are different remote so I’ll try and separate those into different groups while keeping a high level ideas/concepts together.

Onsite/In Person Attendance

This can be very overwhelming on many fronts. Depending on the size of the conference it’s a sensory overload. You often have some sort of show room floor like the World of Solutions at Cisco Live. It’s like being at a concert full of people you don’t know as well as a car dealership. Ton’s of conversations, and tons of selling but take a step back and breath. Lot’s of awesome can come out of it.

First off, listen! Ambient learning/queues are great. You’ll hear a lot of very smart people talking, conversations and topics that might peak your interest. Which brings Second!

Dig into that, if a conversation, topic, product, etc. intrigues you dive in. Remember you are all there for the same reasons and it’s highly unlikely you will get pushed out of or denied part of a conversation.

Third, as overwhelming as it is it’s a great way to make connections both in person and eventually remotely through the years to come. The best part is perspectives. You often get to learn different cultural perspectives as attendees come from all over the world. You can gain inspiration on the way things might be done elsewhere and once you build that connection your might even get some great recipes to try out 🙂

Don’t overdo it on learning classes. It’s easy to burn yourself out by making the entire conference about the classes offered. I’m not saying don’t do them as they are wonderful and ran by very smart individuals but you can spend the entire week trying to soak up all that knowledge and miss out on the social interactions/perspectives/fun/learning.

With that keep an eye out for things like the Social Media Hub and Certification Lounge. Let’s not forget the store where often our favorite cert guide authors do meet ups. These are great places to get in on conversations and discussions and as I’ve said there isn’t a conference I’ve went to where people turn you away.

If you get invited to a dinner/happy hour do it! This is part of why I say don’t wear yourself out on just doing classes because these events happen and again, you’ll make awesome connections and have good discussions even if you just passively listen and say a word here and there.

I guess I am trying to say the TLDR: for in person attendance is to leverage the aspect of learning (the classes/sessions) that might be relevant to you right then, but also take a deep breath in the morning, and interact. You’ll meet fellow industry colleagues, industry rock stars, and ultimately make friends and learn a lot along the way.

Remote Attendee

So the stars didn’t align and you can’t attend Cisco Live in person. That doesn’t mean you are going to miss out on all the news and hype coming from the convention center floors. There are a few key ways to stay involved.

Live Broadcasts:

Cisco Live has quite a few live broadcasts of key events such as keynotes, panels, and innovation talks. The best part is……they offer these for free! They don’t even require a login to watch! “How do I watch these?” you ask. Simply go to the homepage for Cisco Live. They conveniently have a page with the schedule and even ICS downloads so you can add it to your calendar and block that time off distraction free! To see the schedule and information go to the Cisco Live broadcasts page linked below!

https://www.ciscolive.com/global/attend/broadcast-agenda.html

There are many other broadcasts that happen during the events. Often broadcasters such as Tech Field Day and various live steamers on platforms such as Twitch and YouTube live stream within the means they are allowed. I can’t speak to any of them with confirmed streams but encourage you to check them out.

Social Media:

I can’t say this enough. JOIN. I’m not asking you to post, or be active (it would be awesome if you did though) but there are a lot of us on platforms that will be barraging twitter with the hashtag #CLUS. Also keep in mind the hashtag #CISCOCHAMPION and possibly even #CISCOLIVE. It’s been a change over the years with more platforms outside of X(Twitter) such as BlueSky, Mastodon, etc, however vendors and the conference itself leverage social media heavily during the events. You can also follow specific individuals and companies you find interesting and will get a lot of information about new technologies from both Cisco and various vendors. A lot will come straight from the World of Solutions floor as well as keynotes and sessions. Keep up with the tags and follow them to keep up on the event.

More common now with all the interactive streaming/broadcasts are rooms on platforms such as Webex and Discord. Find communities you can join and keep up on the interaction and updates from individuals that are on site or even remote but might be following different channels/websites then you.

Blogs

A lot of individuals in attendance write blog posts. While I will admit that most of the time they aren’t updated daily during Cisco Live many will post within the following week. Also, often blogs from both attendees and companies are scheduled to be published as announcements and releases are made during the conference. These blogs are often linked in social media posts and you can utilize various utilities to keep updated on new posts.

VLOG/Video Content

On top of regular text social media platforms there is a growing number of live streamers and Youtube (etc) content creators. I haven’t talked specifically to any but in years past there have been numerous daily updates from the conference on various medias. Keep an eye out for them!

INTERACT!!!!

I’m stressing this. This is why I also send pleas for you to join Twitter/BlueSky/Mastadon/etc and follow people. You will find that a lot of the most prominent posters on twitter (specifically look for #CiscoChampion) are quite happy to ask questions on your behalf or seek out an answer for you if possible. We don’t bite! We are social for a reason. Secondly, Tweet at @CiscoLive. They have some incentives for remote attendees and I’m not going to lie….that social media team is the best in the biz. They rock and will respond to the best of their abilities!

I look forward to hearing from you! Please do not hesitate to ask me questions on twitter. I can be found by following @mattouellette. Enjoy the show! Don’t forget to block out time on your calendar to watch or catch up on the events you have high interest in!

General Summary

Global ideas that cross both onsite and remote attendance:

• Don’t overwhelm yourself
• Listen and join in
• Interact whether its social, technological, project, vendor, etc related
• Make connections
• Hear experiences and share yours with your industry peers

As a bonus a fellow Cisco Champion whom many of you may or may not (okay you probably do) know, our friendly trainer & author Wendell Odom gave me permission to link his video for attendees new to/studying for CCNA with a perspective of remote attendance. Please note I did not watch this video until after I wrote this so there may be crossover but no intention of idea stealing as we share what we do because we like to help but he’s a much more seasoned veteran of this industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfea2qOavJM

Additional tip: If you are remote you are likely working on other tasks. This is where the streams from the official event, or live content creators are great because you can have them up in the background and if something perks up your ears, you can stop for a minute to watch/note the topic and visit it later. This leads back to my previous post about learning methods and ambient learning.

As we all know, being a worker in information technology is dedication to continued learning. Forever and always. No matter your field of focus. Whether it be workstation/os, networking, wireless, servers, storage, security, or maybe multiple of those and more…it is a never ending grind. This honestly applies to any job/industry but I’ll write this post kind of on an I.T. concept.

That grind crosses multiple arenas. For one, there is simply personal growth. We all have something we want to learn because it intrigues us. From what I see from I.T. colleagues is we always have something we just want to learn/play with because we are curious people. We have to keep our brains moving. It might be an older technology or concept but something that sparks our brain and we want to tackle it.

Additionally there is learning to keep up on what’s new. This is a key thing in the I.T. industry because everything is always changing. This is certainly a challenge that kind of crosses paths with the above of being curious about something new to us that intrigues us. On the same note it’s key in our industry to stay up on what’s neat and new and becoming prominent in the industry.

There is another thing that triggers learning. That is our day to day/day job. Having worked in retail, corporate, and consulting you never know what’s going to pop up. Maybe your business is buying a new I.T. product that you need to help integrate. Or maybe transition to a new technology like from a traditional WAN to an SD-WAN solution. As I once had to do add in a TAP-AGG solution to our main network. That required learning that product/solution.

So how do you balance all of these learning area’s at once. It’s challenging for sure because you want to learn what intrigues you, what’s new in the industry, and what’s required of your day to day job tasks. It’s key to keep things straight and separate in a way.

I’m going to continue this post with the assumption you play in all of those arenas. The first thing that is key is time. This can be a tough one. Hopefully if you need to learn something for your job your company will let you set aside time during your day to focus on that. This can also come into play with learning to keep up with industry new trends. That last one is quite dependent on how your employer views emerging technology and keeping it’s staff up to date.

When it comes to the idea of learning new things that intrigue you for personal growth that more likely requires you using your own personal time. My best advice for this is use “down” time to your advantage. That may be your drive to/from work (or other places), lunch time, waking up an hour earlier, sitting in a waiting room (Doctor, car service, etc) for some sit down learning time.

There are multiple ways to leverage all this time. Drives can be a great time for listening to what I’m going to quote/unquote as “podcasts”. This could be a literal podcast, listening to a video such as youtube, udemy, other training platforms (please don’t watch and drive but leverage listening). Lunch and waiting rooms are great for watching video’s. Most videos from companies/training platforms/video bloggers are short and you can get one or two in.

We all have a life outside of this industry. Some of us have significant others and kids to take care of that may have functions going on in the evening. Family to meet up with from time to time for different events. Friends and Family to meet up with for a beverage or dinner. Sports and hobbies are a thing for us all. Maybe even a show/sport you like to watch. For me a key is to walk my dog as A: it’s good for me to get some exercise, B: it’s good for her as she is a senior dog so it keeps her moving and her joints health, and C: it’s a great time to clear my mind and even get the occasion interaction with neighbors and their kids. Don’t give any of that up. For me, I try and spend 30 minutes before bed reading something, but don’t stay up too late and be tired the next day because that doesn’t help.

Now to keep balance between studying multiple things set a schedule. Maybe that extra hour in the morning is the “keep up with the industry” time. Then your driving time/waiting rooms/lunch time is for the “what I want to learn that intrigues me” time. Since it’s a “just for you/fun” learning effort those distracting times can be good as you don’t have to be AS focused. Hopefully if you need to learn something for work you get that time as part of your job to learn it. The key is to set certain time’s for certain learning tasks to keep them separate and not be jumping back and forth between focuses during a sprint.

With that, keep boards on apps such as Trello. Break down what you are learning into chunks and keep track of it. That may be chapters in a book, videos, topics on an exam blueprint, or sections of a vendors training outline. I like to use Onenote and keep notebooks broken down into sections for whatever I’m trying to learn. I know some people prefer to do hand written notes in notebooks as it helps them with retention writing it down. Do what works for you but try to keep track. Keep a schedule and mark things off as you complete them.

The TL;DR is that in this industry there is always something to learn from some reason or another and often we have to juggle learning multiple things at the same time. This is fine but you have to dedicate time to each and use that time to focus as opposed to bouncing back and forth between things you are learning. You can’t tie your shoes and rake leaves at the same time. You need to give them each their own committed time.