Have you been inundated with online calls and meetings? Over the last few years webinars were beginning to become more popular as a way to sell products or services by adding value. You watch the webinar and stay to the end of the show for a special deal or discount. Since the pandemic began in March online meetings and programming became even more popular as companies try to keep their brand in front of the public. This is good and bad; good because you can keep updated without leaving the comfort of your home, bad because everyone began doing online meetings and as humans we can only handle so much computer time. If you’re like me you began watching how many meetings you attend during a day.
Selecting presentations and meetings to attend can be extremely hard but just like a physical functions you can’t be everywhere. You of course would attend your preferred association’s meetings for business related items, but then there are the other meetings and webinars. The presentations that are offering value but lower on the importance scale to your specific needs. These presentations are good if there is enough time in the day. The question is how much can one person’s brain take in with information? How many notes can one person make? What do you do?
I have divided my time as stated above for most of my meetings. Interviews, important meetings all come first and then time available is allocated to those online presentations of interest. I try to go to everything possible for a couple of reasons. One I always need content for my programming and I always learn something from every event I attend. I call these happy accidents.
Happy accidents are those times when you read the title of a webinar and don’t expect to learn something new. If you listen carefully to people presenting you often will find little nuggets of information that can be useful to you or your business. This happened the other day on a webinar, not necessarily information for myself but I was thought if someone was watching in the industry that was looking for a job then the information was crucial.
The webinar was a presentation from enforcement professionals on road safety. As I was watching the webinar the information was fairly basic to anyone involved in the industry for a long period of time. Once in a while I would write down a statistic shared on the screen that I thought was interesting. With two presenters you would think the information would generally be the same on the same topic but I was happy to see a different take from a general to enforcement standpoint between the presenters. Here is where the “happy accident” happened for the right person.
I was watching a webinar on road safety and near the end the enforcement person began to talk about career opportunities in the enforcement career space. Here’s the lesson; if you were the person looking for a job but were watching because you were interested in road safety then you just got a bonus for being in the right place at the right time. Who would think you would find a job opportunity on a road safety webinar?
The next time you are wondering which webinar you will attend think about the happy accidents. It may not be life-changing information based on the title but could offer you opportunity or ideas that you hadn’t planned, similar to finding a treasure in a small town gift shop. If you are looking a list of webinars to attend The Trucking Network hold weekly webinars. You can learn more at www.thetruckingnetworkevents.ca
About the Author
Bruce Outridge has been in the trucking industry for over 30 years. He is a former driver, fleet supervisor, author of the books Running By The Mile and Driven to Drive, and producer and host of The Lead Pedal Podcast for Truck Drivers. You can listen and subscribe to the podcast at www.theleadpedalpodcast.com or on your favourite podcast platform
