As I sit in a hotel room in Texas the day before the start of the Professional Background Screening Association (PBSA) annual conference, it made me pause to consider how much better this is than going virtual during the pandemic. Don’t get me wrong, there are benefits to learning virtually, and I can learn from both virtual and in-person classes, but there is something different about an in-person conference.

When in-person conferences weren’t an option, virtual allowed much of the conference to go on. However, the opportunities for networking were sorely missed by many.

Some people might only think about the cost savings of virtual events. With in-person events there are flights, hotels, meals, and car or taxi fees. While those costs are not incurred when attending virtually, so much of the value is missed. As stated in an article from the National Library of Medicine website, there are many downsides to virtual attendance. While this article was addressing medical conferences specifically, much of the information pertains to all conferences:

• Audience engagement can be negatively impacted.
• Responding or asking questions virtually is more impersonal.
• There may be less engagement between speaker and audience.
• With recorded sessions, the attendee is unable to participate in real time answer and question sessions.
• Technical aspects of joining remotely can be challenging.
• Conference organizers must also consider time differences when planning sessions.
• Costs of hosting the conference may also shift to the audience if the vendors are not allowed to present their products.

Let’s look at audience participation for example. Just ask yourself, and be honest, how many times during a virtual conference or event have you thought, I will just check this one email, or I will just send this one note and then you went down the rabbit hole only to realize that you just missed out on a bunch of information?

And I don’t know about you, but sometimes I find it hard to get a question in without using the chat feature. When we are in person there are visual queues for people who want to ask questions. Those are often missed in virtual events. The “meeting” time for virtual events is scheduled so all of the questions may not be answered before the meeting cutoff time. When we are in-person speakers are usually willing to stay a little longer to get more questions answered.

LinkedIn gives a list of reasons for attending conferences, and of course one of those reasons is professional networking. The value of networking and catching up with counterparts from organizations cannot be overstated. Not all of the learning happens in the conference sessions. At last year’s PBSA conference a group of us got together several times during the conference. We would compare notes. This allowed us to get information from sessions we could not attend, and even when some of us were in the same session our focus was on different parts of the presentation, so we were able to help each other with what me may have missed.  We lose out on all of this when we can’t attend in person.

LinkedIn also points out how important it is for us to get out of our normal surroundings and see new things to help spark new ideas. Fresh perspectives are not just about thinking differently, sometimes we need to physically go somewhere different and see new things. There are so many pluses to going to in-person conferences. I look forward to the next few days of learning, and I look forward to seeing all of you at the Employment Law Briefing on September 27 and the 2024 ASE HR Conference this coming March.

Sources: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov; linkedin.com