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A clip from this longer presentation – CareerCamp: New Unconference Methods for Helping People Build the Career They Deserve with Douglas E. Welch
CareerCamp Founder, Douglas E. Welch, shares CareerCamp with the attendees of the California Placement Association at their annual 2015 conference in San Luis Obispo.
He discusses What is CareerCamp?, how it might be used in your organization and takes you through an example of a Day at CareerCamp.
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Transcript:
No hard sell. This can be a hard rule to enforce sometimes. Basically I have found that people are pretty good about it if you tell them right up front. This isn’t about selling, it’s about sharing the information that you know. So, we can have authors come in. We can have consultants come in and everything, but I always say to them. “Feel free to mention your web site at the end of your talk.” That’s not what I’m talking about. What I don’t want it to be is a sales presentation. I really want you to share real useful, hard information with the people who are here. And that goes into our third rule – the Rule of Two Feet. Now, this always sounds funny. The Rule of Two Feet is this — if you are in a session — if you are in a breakout session, if you are listening to a presentation — if you are in a room with a speaker — and you’re not getting any value out of it, you are freely encouraged — in fact, highly encouraged — to use your own “two feet” and go and find another session that is useful to you, that is important to you, that teaches you something and that is one way we fight the hard sell, too. Because hard sell people will see, en masse, audiences get up and walk out.
What is CareerCamp and Career Camp International?
CareerCamp is a community organized, career-focused, unconference which calls upon local communities and people to share their knowledge, expertise and other important information on developing yourself and your career.
What is an unconference?
Unconferences are self-organizing conferences, similar to many professional conferences, but instead of hiring well-known, professional speakers, they call on the attendees themselves to provide the content and focus for the event. Every person who attends is highly encouraged to present on some topic deeply important to them or, barring that, to facilitate an open breakout session or round table discussion or even just to engage and converse with their fellow attendees between presentations. A few organizers band together to find a venue for the event, recruit sponsors and invite attendees, but the focus of the unconference is driven solely by the attendees.
Some might question the usefulness of presentations by their peers, but we have found that there is an enormous amount of real-world expertise available in each and every local community. CareerCamp utilizes a format that draws out that expertise and benefits everyone. CareerCamp (and other unconferences) provide a structure and an opportunity to share this expertise in ways that traditional conferences do not. Additionally, CareerCamps also attract career development professionals who can use CareerCamp as a way of introducing themselves to a new audience of potential clients.
How was CareerCamp developed?
The genesis of CareerCamp was found by attending BarCamp unconferences held around the world. CareerCamp founder, Douglas E. Welch, was a long time attendee of BarCamp, which is an event that embraces any topic, although it often leans toward technology. After seeing the success of BarCamp as a way to illuminate and educate within a community, Welch applied the unconference concept to the specific world of Career Development.
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