In Defence of Conferences

Choosing events that support development over attendance

Conferences get a bad rap. It’s become on-trend to have a pop at them, to say that events are a waste of time, that we go along, we nod, we smile, we take notes, and then we do nothing with any of it, and that there’s therefore something fundamentally wrong with the format.

The criticism tends to come from two camps.

The first is made up of people who have spent a lot of time going to conferences and have realised they aren’t getting much from them. The second is made up of people trying to sell you access to their own conference by slagging everyone else’s off, and their reasons for doing that are obvious enough that I don’t want to spend much time on them here.

The first camp is worth discussing. There are a lot of conferences available in our industry, and a lot in other industries that we might be able to learn from as well, and to say, or to suggest, that big conferences are inherently not viable, or don’t work in terms of making us better at what we do, is an oversimplification stretched to the point where it stops being accurate. That’s not to say they’re right for everyone, or right for every problem.

What I’ve gained

At different points in my career I have gained varying amounts from different types of event. When I started, I gained a tremendous amount from attending big conferences such as Learning Technologies; I had no map of the profession, no sense of who was doing what or why, and no way of telling which of my assumptions about the job were widely shared and which were quirks of the organisation I happened to be sitting in. Two days and a large exhibition hall gave me all of that at once.

As time has gone on, those same events have provided me with less and less value, whereas smaller, niche and specific events have become of increasing value to me as I have found the areas in which I want to deliberately focus and develop my practice.

Variation between events

I’ve also found that not all big events, and not all small events, are uniform.

• Some events are more commercially focused.

• Some are more practice-focused.

• Some focus on getting as many people as possible in the room.

• Some focus on having the right people in the room for a discussion.

• Some focus on matching format to speaker and to audience.

• Others run a set format that you buy into by attending.

None of this is right or wrong, though it may be more or less right or wrong for you at a given time. It’s personal and temporal as opposed to absolute.

The isolation problem

One thing that stuck in my mind while I was thinking about this is that I’m increasingly having conversations with people in our industry who feel incredibly isolated: people working in-house, people who are freelance, people who run businesses, people who work remotely full-time. I speak to people who are in the office often, or even full-time, and who still feel isolated because what they do is so specific compared to everyone else around them; the rest of their team is counting down the days until retirement while they’re trying to press ahead in their career, and finding little support for that within the organisation.

We know that isolation is not good for the way in which we think, and it isn’t good in terms of progressing our practice. Perceived social isolation is associated with poorer cognitive performance and with a confirmatory bias in social thinking that protects us in the moment and works against us over time (Cacioppo and Hawkley, 2009), and workplace loneliness has been linked to lower job performance (Ozcelik and Barsade, 2018). The World Health Organization now treats social connection as a public health priority, having found that around one in six people worldwide experience loneliness (WHO, 2025).

We stop being exposed to new ideas, new connections, and new approaches, and we inherently become institutionalised. We fall into the pattern of thinking that if I think it and everyone around me agrees, it must be right, and this must be the best way forwards. We stop looking to improve. Opinion and behaviour are more homogeneous within groups than between them, which is why the people who connect across groups tend to have sight of options that nobody sitting inside a single group is likely to see (Burt, 2004).

These situations can also have significant impacts on mental health and on our ability to focus more generally.

Whether we are introverted or extroverted, human beings are still fundamentally social beings. We benefit from being around others, especially when we can engage in a constructive and meaningful way to address a challenge, and a well-run event is one of the few ways of arranging that on purpose.

My bias

I say all of this as someone who is incredibly biased. I run events. They are not right for everyone, and I will be the first to say that the Evidence-Informed Practice Conference is not for someone who spends every moment of their professional life developing e-learning and has no interest in the science and research behind how people learn, think, and perform. That particular person might be much better served by a trip to DevLearn, or to an a11y event focused on digital accessibility.

Choosing carefully

I’m not arguing that all conferences are amazing, or that anyone who says they aren’t getting anything from them is wrong. At a time when budgets are tight, time is tight, and effort is hard to justify, the argument is that you should choose very carefully what you attend.

Even if you have had negative experiences attending big conferences, small conferences, roundtables, or whatever else, don’t shut yourself off from the entire event space. Ahead of booking or agreeing to go to anything, ask yourself two questions:

• What elements of my practice do I want to focus on?

• What do I want to deliberately improve over the coming twelve months?

Once you know the answer to that, then and only then should you start thinking about:

• Which events in the calendar could support me on that journey?

• Who’s speaking at them?

• What format will it be in?

• What points will they be addressing?

• How will I be able to engage with this?

• Is it going to answer the specific questions I have about getting better in this field?

Then go to those events, and let go of the ones that everyone says you must go to, or that are such staples in the calendar that you feel you’re somehow missing out by not being there, even though every time you attend you walk away thinking what a waste of time that was.

At the end of the day, it isn’t always about the event. It may be about your decisions.

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References

Burt, R.S. (2004) ‘Structural holes and good ideas’, American Journal of Sociology, 110(2), pp. 349-399.

Cacioppo, J.T. and Hawkley, L.C. (2009) ‘Perceived social isolation and cognition’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(10), pp. 447-454.

Ozcelik, H. and Barsade, S.G. (2018) ‘No employee an island: workplace loneliness and job performance’, Academy of Management Journal, 61(6), pp. 2343-2366.

World Health Organization (2025) From loneliness to social connection: charting a path to healthier societies. Geneva: WHO.