From Geek to Star #24 - How much are you ready to pay for Industry Knowledge?

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🗓️ This Week – Episode 24: how much are you willing to invest to build up your Industry Knowledge?

This week, I attended for 3 days an event in Singapore called Web in Travel for which I paid 1,500 SGD (after negotiated discount 😐). I've just launched my solo business in early September, so this is money which came out straight from my own pocket, not paid by a company I would be working for. To be honest, I gave it a thought a few days before finally deciding to pay this amount.

The reasons why I finally decided to pay for it:

• Quality of the talks: I had been to this event twice in the past 5 years (paid by the company I was working for at the time), and I knew that the talks and discussion panels were of good quality, with questions and answers not being just generic as you may often hear in events where most are sharing general ideas or just promoting their product or services. 

• Quality of the attendees: this conference has been around for 20 years and while not being the event with the most attendees in the travel and hospitality industry, this is an event of reference in Travel and Hospitality where the event organizer really built close relationships with leaders from Agoda, Booking.com, Trip.com, Accor, Pan Pacific, Air Asia… but also startups in Travel and Hospitality. They come and spend time a good part of the 3 days, while in some other conferences they just come for a talk then leave, giving me little chance to engage in conversations with them. 

Was it finally a good ROI (Return on Investment) and a good ROTI (Return on Time Invested)? I kept telling myself every day during the event “remember how much you paid!” to attend the event in really active mode:

• I was super focused during each talk / discussion panel, taking a lot of notes (for memory stickiness) and  recording (to put the recordings in Google NotebookLM to create summaries) 

  • Building up my Industry Knowledge: value difficult to measure but I felt I did learn a bunch of new stuff during this 3 days.

  • Providing me almost 20 hours of personal notes and recordings for me to do a  “Travel and Hospitality takeaways” series on Linkedin to share and continue to build my visibility in Travel and Hospitality: good value as I need to strengthen my solo business in that field. 

•  I took opportunity to go and speak to strangers during the breaks, lunches and evening cocktails: it did require efforts on my side as I am not a natural extrovert and I wouldn't say I could connect with lots of people, but I did make some interesting connections opening my mind on topics such as inclusive travel (for disabled people), religious travels (e.g from Indonesia with many muslim people to Saudi Arabia), loyalty sharing systems…  Again, difficult to measure but new things adding on.

• I was not able to connect as much as I would have liked to with some leaders of big travel tech companies: an area of improvement for me in my SHINE ✨

• I could reconnect with some people I had not met for a long time and who had changed jobs. With one of these people, we had a very good re-connection and it may turn out to become a fruitful collaboration in view: if this happens, it will be worth much more than the price I paid for the event - fingers crossed! 🤞

 Building up your Industry Knowledge requires investment from you

The example above shows you a very concrete financial investment to build up Industry Knowledge. In some previous companies I’ve been working for, I met some colleagues in tech who had been in the company for more than 10 years but surprisingly did not know much about the specifics of the industry and the business of the company. They had always just focused on the tech aspects of their jobs - and therefore somewhat stagnated from a career perspective. 

There are some other ways you can activate, but ultimately it requires investment on your side, either financially or with your time.

• Attending Industry events: whatever the industry you are in, there are industry events. Don't just go to Tech events, focus also on Industry events - ask your business colleagues which ones are worth it in terms of content quality and audience quality. If you are working in a company, take the initiative to ask your manager to be able to attend one of these events on the training budget of the company. If you are not proactive on this, the company won't push you since you are in the “Tech” department so won't be top of mind to attend. And be intentionally active when attending to make the most of it. 

• Step out of your first circle: at work, block for example 1 hour (lunchtime or else) every 2 or 3 weeks for a casual “tell me about our business” session with a colleague close to the customers of the company. In hospitality, that would be either the business development teams (managing the deals with hotel owners to sell hotel contracts) or the hotel operation teams (following up on how hotels are managed on a day to day basis). You will learn a ton of real life stories, pain points, expectations of customers - including the untold stories bringing unique insights.

• Build your own industry intelligence bot: there are free quality newsletters and podcasts on every industry, maybe your company also has access to some paid intelligence (ask your CIO/CTO or colleagues in the strategy department). With a bit of automation (all newsletters sent to an intelligence folder in your mailbox, a workflow with n8n with an LLM parsing the newsletters to digest the most important information in your context with your custom prompt), you can have your own chief of staff briefing you on the industry news during your morning breakfast. 

🙏 I’d Love to Hear From You

In which industry are you working and what is specific there that you think Tech can play a significant role? 

Reply to this email, I read every note.

You can follow me on LinkedIn for more reflections and “behind-the-scenes” thinking between newsletters. Don't hesitate to engage discussions there in the comments to also start showing and sharing your thoughts publicly - this will help your own SHINE. If you want to know more about how I can support you 1-1 to thrive in your tech career, have a look at my offerings here.  

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✨ May the Shift be with you!

From Geek to Star by Khang | The Way Forward