Why are we going to the Meet Central Europe 2018 conference?
Why are we attending industry events at all?
Planning for the short-term, the best solution is to lock yourselves up in your comfortable and well-equipped office. It’s easy to make yourselves and your environment believe that you are the best and most professional at what you do, and if you cannot provide a solution, a more favourable price or a better deadline, it surely cannot be done.
You can invest significant time and energy into building your castle and make yourselves believe you are at the top.
Just lay back, relax and…. you’ve already fallen over. Instead, we opted for a bumpier road.
We keep pushing our boundaries, believe in continuous and ongoing development, the importance of lifelong learning and human relationships. From the outset, we tried to attend at least one international conference and, if possible, several smaller, but all the more valuable Hungarian industry events each year. Later on, once we started allocating separate budgets for travels and pricey admission fees more boldly, we managed to visit more places. Thanks to the numerous events that today can also be followed online, we managed to virtually get as far as Monterey. In similar manner, we also got to visit Asia.
How did we benefit from these events?
First of all, it’s super refreshing to leave the daily grind behind for a bit. Speaking to fellow professionals from all corners of the globe is at once surprising and stimulating. In an international setting, it’s much easier to openly address issues and search for solutions together than one would imagine.
For me, as a manager, these events represent renewal, inspiration and exciting new collaborations.
At the same time, my associates return with plenty of new knowledge, and often with the feeling of success and satisfaction one gets knowing that they were able to say something new and constructive to an international colleague. On such occasions, I feel immense pride. Thanks to this exchange of knowledge, we look at our processes with more critical eyes, and gain the courage to disrupt and reconstruct. The term ‘disruption’ was also one I picked up at a conference.
An invaluable by-product of these meetings is the building of human relationships, which is how we found ourselves in an international consortium and it’s probably as a result of this that we were the first in Hungary to try our luck at remote interpreting.
We expect Meet Central Europe 2018 to provide a setting where we can finally meet LSP representatives that we don’t typically see at other international events. We can’t wait to hear what they deal with on a day-to-day basis, and together find the intersection points.
We will be there, looking to learn and experience, but we’ll not be keeping our knowledge to ourselves either, because as the basic rule goes: knowledge sharing only works if everyone contributes.
By: Balázs Márta
