Increasing your Chance of Selection for Tech Con

02 May 2019 by Keith Elder

Keith Elder is the Senior Technology Evangelist on the Quicken Loans Emerging Technology team. This team looks to the future to see how new technologies can impact the business.

The Tech Con selection committee pours over all of the submissions we receive each year, spending the week after the call for speakers closes reviewing and voting for sessions. Then the committee comes together and combs over each individual submission. This process takes a lot of time and effort to ensure the right mix of sessions are selected.

In the spirit of Default to Open, I've put together a list of things the committee takes into consideration when evaluating each session. Before submitting your session(s), review these to give your submission the best chance of being selected.

Tech Con is Treated as a Public Conference

While Tech Con is held for our internal and Rock FOC team members, it’s not to be treated like an internal conference. While the majority of attendees are team members, there are also other guests in attendance such as:

Media and news
Invited guests
Potential recruits
External speakers
College students
Special guests
Partners (Those who setup booths or who want to mingle with our team members
Others

So, you see, it isn't JUST an internal conference, and as such, we can't just get up on stage and say anything we want. This component is crucial to take into consideration while preparing your session ideas. As you prepare to submit your session, ask yourself, would you want everything you said to be on the front page of the New York Times the next morning? If not, then go back to the drawing board. Having a wide audience also means speakers are unable to mention or use internal project codes and internal system names. Technical demos can’t show internal system names or anything that would give someone additional information about our security. Please keep this in mind when you’re submitting your session.

Think Globally

A common reason for sessions not to be selected is that they have too narrow of a focus and apply only to the FOC or Quicken Loans. Submitted sessions should be applicable to anyone, not just to your FOC team. For example, let's say you submit a session about a particular process internally that’s working for your team. While it may be super valuable for those at your immediate company, other team members probably don’t have the same process and may not find it valuable. A quick way to gauge this is to determine your target audience. If your topic applies to a specific role at a specific company, then it’s too narrow. If it applies to a specific role across any company, then it’ll have a global reach. Always think globally.

Secret Sauce

As stated above, we think of Tech Con as a public event. Since there are attendees at the event that aren't team members, we don’t allow anyone to share any secret sauce. The Wire has published an article about PR, Branding, and Messaging to reference before submitting your session. The same rules The Wire uses for external speaker engagements apply to Tech Con. For example, if your team worked on an amazing project using artificial intelligence and machine learning to process client data quicker and find ways to close more loans – that’s secret sauce! While it’s a great story and others can learn from it, Tech Con isn’t the right venue to share this story. There are other ways to share topic ideas with secret sauce in them and we have a team that specializes in helping tell these kinds of stories. Reach out to ITTeamCommunicators@quickenloans.com for help if your topic falls into this category.

Avoid Vendor Sessions

Our Public Relations team has a hard and fast rule: "We never promote any vendor publicly." Sessions promoting a specific vendor product or talks submitted in conjunction with a vendor won’t be selected since Tech Con is treated as a public conference. NOTE: We do sometimes pick sessions submitted by partners we do business with like Amazon, Microsoft. These sessions are thoroughly vetted and pass all of our criteria.

Write an Amazing Title and Abstract

Let's say you were tasked with reading 200-300 conference submissions and you came across a session with an abstract that read as follows: "I’ll fill this in later."

That's an actual abstract we received last year, and we've had multiple over the years that were just one line.

There's an entire art to writing a great abstract. With so many sessions to choose from, you need to make yours stand out. The abstract gives the selection committee details of what you'll speak about, and , if selected, helps attendees decide if they want to attend your session. The same thing can be said about your title. The Wire has put together several articles used during their Speaker Workshop (you should sign up!) outlining how to write an abstract and how to come up with a title for your session. Please review those and contact TheWire@quickenloans.com if you would like help with your title or abstract. They are here to help!

No Workshops

You’ll notice when you submit your session that we don’t offer workshops in the dropdown. We have still had some come through over the years, but the reason this isn’t in the dropdown is because we host the event at Cobo. Because of that, we’re bound by a set of rules. Workshops where tables are needed cost money to switch up and reset rooms. Also, workshops tend to last half or full days and we don’t have the space to accommodate them at this time.

If you have a workshop you’d really like to do, reach out to Technology University.

Theme Mismatch

Each year a theme emerges for Tech Con. Sometimes it’s decided after the submission window closes, and other years one emerges as we review the content. Last year, the theme was Master your Craft and this year's theme is Unleash Your Inner Scientist. So, keep this year’s theme in mind as you determine which sessions to submit.

Don't Wing It

For Tech Con ‘18, 70% of the sessions submitted were submitted by external speakers. The majority of these speakers are very experienced. Typically, the sessions submitted by external speakers have been given at other events and an enormous amount of time has been spent shaping their session titles and abstracts. If you whip together a quick title and abstract, odds are not in your favor that you’ll be selected. This is why we have a generous amount of time for submissions.

In 2018, there were only 17 sessions and three panels. With hundreds of sessions to select from, be sure you’re doing everything you can to stick out! This is where your title and abstract gets our attention, so be sure it’s well thought out and thorough.

Be Relevant

The final item that matters about your session is making sure it’s relevant. For example, if you were submitting a session for a Leadership Conference, would you submit a session entitled: "10 Ways You’re Doing JavaScript Wrong?” Of course not, because it wouldn't be relevant.

Each year we host Tech Con and give our team members the opportunity to step away from their desks and learn something new. We’re trying to give our team members something they can take back to impact the business in a variety of ways. When you submit a session, regardless of the topic, be sure it’s relevant. For example, as a Technology team we don’t use the Perl language (well, I'm sure someone out there does) as it’s not an approved language to write applications in. So, submitting a session titled "10 Reasons You Should be Using Perl" isn’t relevant because Perl has been around forever.

The only caveat to this rule is if your session revolves around a new emerging technology or something we should be looking at as a company because then that’s relevant.

I hope you found these tips valuable for submitting a session for Tech Con '19. The selection committee has to make hard decisions because we're looking to select the absolute best sessions. Remember, The Wire is here to help if you need any guidance before submitting. If you haven't, register for The Wire's 3-day Speaker Workshop which provides tips and walks you through the process of speaking externally.

See you all at Tech Con '19!

Tight lines and calm seas - Keith Elder, Sr. Technology Evangelist