TOP 15 technology events. Calendar for H2 2018 to satisfy ALL departments and make people want to work in your company
Event is a very positive and popular employer branding tool. It is also a very efficient one. Events have a great impact on brand’s image as an employer regardless of the role the company’s representatives play in it. The clue is to pick the right events to attend. The tech industry changes constantly, so it is crucial to keep the teams, leaders and executives up-to-date. We have gathered 15 Technological events-to-be in this technology events calendar for H2 2018. Check the event list along with employer branding goals they will help fulfill.
Employer branding goals that can be fulfilled through a proper tech events calendar
Before we skip to the tech events calendar, let’s focus for a second on the vital role of the events in employer branding management. For the sole purpose of this text, let’s put aside the events that you organize for the company. This is the material for a whole article (let me know in the comment section if you want one!).
The main goal of employer branding is to build the positive attitude towards the brand among former, existing and potential employees. If the company representatives attend an event they are perceived as the faces of the employer and its advocates. Only the fulfilled, satisfied and genuinely enthusiastic people can be a magnet for others that might be interested in a certain workplace.
Think of it as of the “good ‘ol” word of mouth marketing. The recommendation from the satisfied employee is worth a 1000 Facebook campaigns. People, especially Millennials (the core of today’s tech professionals), value the overall workplace environment. They want to be satisfied, fulfilled and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Only the people who truly represent mentioned values can attract the proper candidates.
Attending the top-notch events is also a great benefit for the employees. First of all, it is an opportunity to meet the top players. Second, it updates the information and allows to work on real-life case studies. But from the employer point of view, it shows important team members how valuable they are. Such high satisfaction of the staff increases employee involvement, their satisfaction and other performance indicators. That’s a win-win situation.
Tech events calendar for H2 2018
Now that you know why you should include events in your employer branding strategy, let us think together which technology networking events, summits or conferences are worth attending in H2 2018.
Upcoming tech events: Conferences
Trend Hunter’s Innovation Conference
Date: July 5th
Place: London
About the event: Even though Trend Hunter’s Innovation Conference is a one-day event, it is one of the most data- and content-packed tech conferences Europe have ever seen. It offers a program of engaging speakers. The presentations will be based on data-driven research. The multi-media rich trend presentations will reveal 18 megatrends that are changing the Today’s world. Aside from inspiration and networking opportunities, this conference will provide the attendees with a toolkit of $4,000 worth of resources. This will keep all the inspiration useful and actionable. The organizers promise to offer free individual assessments to the attendees. They claim it will help people find their company’s strengths and development points when it comes to thinking like a true innovator.
Who should go: As the Global VP of Innovation says, “Any senior executive would benefit hugely from taking a couple of days and attending…”
Which employer branding goals it fits: This trends conference combined with an innovation conference is a biggie. Aside from strengthening the bond between the company and executives it also helps to enhance their productivity. Providing a team with a powerful tool pack will surely help them to increase their performance rates. New technologies are changing fast. So a little update once now and then is a good idea.
Next ’18
Date: July 24th – 26th
Place: San Francisco, CA
About the event: Next ’18 is one of the most anticipated upcoming tech events. It is a three-day festival of innovation, knowledge and education. It is an event where you can learn how Google works and powers everyone’s successes. Through numerous demonstrations, code labs, keynotes, conversations, boot camps, breakouts and leadership panels, anyone can learn about cloud solutions and participate in making the tech history. The conference covers eight themes, which are: application development, collaboration & productivity, data analytics, infrastructure & operations, Internet of Things, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence, mobility & devices and security. It grants that everyone will find something for themselves.
Who should go: CEOs, NGOs, developers, and anyone passionate about an accessible, scalable, socially responsible cloud. Everyone with a slightly tech-related position will be glad to attend this Google conference.
Which employer branding goals it fits: First, Next ’18 is an event organized by one of the top players in the whole wide technology world. It gathers profs, CEOs, decision makers and lightning-in-a-jar talents from all over the globe. It sums up to be a pretty nice audience to show your team’s’ spirit and make some new connections in the industry. The second dimension is the knowledge. It enhances the performance of all teams involved and many more. The Next ’18 conference serves both internal and external employer branding purposes.
Gartner Catalyst Conference 2018
Date: August 20th – 23rd
Place: San Diego, CA
About the event: Cloud, big data, IoT, DevOps, analytics, enterprise applications, and AI are the keywords of this tech event. All of them are advancing rapidly. They create new digital opportunities and build a whole new technology ecosystem. This environment is diverse and complex. To manage it, one must learn some solid skills first. Gartner Catalyst Conference answers the question what skills it should be in the first place. It helps in understanding the new technology trends and teaches all necessary information that digital business transformation requires.
Who should go: This is the must-attend event for technical professionals.
Which employer branding goals it fits: The event allows its attendees to meet with technology providers to check the options and solve any appealing problems. Plus hey! It’s Gartner’s event – the world’s leading research and advisory company. Gartner helps business leaders across all major functions in every sector. Back to the Employer Branding Goals – It will definitely help resolve some issues and increase whole team’s productivity. Also, it brings the splendor of meeting the top players of the industry and thus might be a huge reward for all technical profs in your company. This can help you increase some indirect employee retention indicators, like satisfaction.
Industry of Things World
Date: September 23rd – 25th
Place: Berlin
About the event: The industry of Things World main issue is to analyze real-life user case studies of changes brought to businesses and industries through the smart manufacturing technologies. The most recent strategies and insights are presented by top speakers from all over the world. The event is attended by more than a 1000 senior level executives and leading professionals. They meet on a yearly basis to discuss the most urgent challenges and solutions of smart manufacturing. What’s more, they also present and comment newest trends, technologies and best practice innovations in their field.
The mainly discussed topic is the 4th industrial revolution. The scoop is approached by 90+ experts and industry leaders. All of them share their experience and explain development in recent projects. To prepare for the incoming changes they also try to forecast trends and share best practices, and discuss some top-notch projects of recent days. All of these important topics are covered during 60+ interactive and innovative sessions.
Who should go: 95% of the event attendees are decision makers and people with the direct/indirect budget responsibility.
Which employer branding goals it fits: Strengthen the brand and expand its reach. The events gathering the executives and decision makers are great to spread the word about the brand among other top players, especially that more than 80% of them join this event to evaluate new services, technologies and products.
European Women in Technology
Date: November 28th – 29th
Place: Amsterdam
About the event: The Women in Technology series is one very important event in the event calendar. As the technology sector was not-so-welcoming- for the half of the population for many decades, it is crucial to teach and act on gender diversity. The best teaching is through the personal experience, hence the event highlights the experiences of industry leaders. It also puts weight on developing women’s skills, both soft and technical. Everything to open people’s minds to new ideas. Everything to push the boundaries just a little bit further.
The tech sector can benefit from inspirational keynote speakers, personal and career development workshops, technical classes and networking opportunities.
Who should go: First of all, The Women in Technology is a conference for women. It welcomes all the ladies who are working in technology and aiming to advance their career. But it’s not only for the profs. It is the perfect event for the gals who just started out in the technology sector and they are looking for some inspiration and ideas.
Aside from the main participants, the event is also for professionals who want to push workforce diversity to the forefront of their agenda, and industry leaders that want to gain a thorough insight into retaining and developing female talent.
Which employer branding goals it fits: Workforce diversity and improving the company culture are the most important things that can be achieved through attending The Women in Technology.
Technology events calendar: Summits
2018 New York Venture Summit
Date: July 10th – 11th
Place: New York, NY
About the event: New York Venture Summit is the place where innovation meets capital. It is a great opportunity for cutting-edge venture backed early stage and developing companies to present their idea to the potential investors and financiers. There will also be some panels to discuss trends in the financial markets, business models and the opportunities and challenges that Investors and Entrepreneurs are facing nowadays.
Who should go: If you work for a start-up – send founders and the IT crew. They are the best choice to present the company to the wider audience. They will speak passionately about the business and share the unique quality of the company. In case you work for the potential investor, send a representative of the department that will benefit the most from the new technologies (IT, Marketing, Sales – make your choice) and send them along with the decision maker, possibly COO or CTO.
Which employer branding goals it fits: It depends on whether your company will go as a start-up to be presented or an investor. In the first case, the event will definitely help to spread the word about the brand among the others. In the second case, the event will help to establish your position as an industry leader and might be helpful in new talents acquisition.
Open Source Summit North America
Date: September 11th – 14th
Place: Los Angeles, CA
About the event: Open Source Summit is a blanket name for four events: LinuxCon, ContainerCon, CloudOpen and Open Community Conference. It focuses, as the name states, on open technologies, including Linux, containers, cloud computing and more. Attendees can share the knowledge and learn from 2,000+ developers, operators and community leadership professionals. The event is led by an author of The Art of Community, Jono Bacon, who is also community leader consultant to such organizations as Huawei, HackerOne, Microsoft, GitLab, Creative Commons, Sony Mobile, ClusterHQ and many others.
Who should go: As the event attendees are mostly IT Professionals, this is the event for software developers, programmers, maintainers, IT operations experts, system admins and chief architects. However, senior business execs, managers, and legal counsel will also find something for themselves.
Which employer branding goals it fits: This event will improve branding management KPIs mainly in the areas of recruitment and retention. Sending people to such prestigious event will increase their motivation. They’ll have a chance to share some of the company’s spirit and thus show it as a great place to work. Moreover, it is the place where the top industry specialists come to gain and exchange their knowledge. Who knows, maybe your new wunderkind is there, waiting to be discovered?
Woman in Tech Summit (West or Southeast)
Date: September 15th (West), or November 17th (Southeast)
Place: Denver, CO (West), Raleigh – Durham (Southeast)
About the event: The Women in Tech Summit is a name of the series of events. Their goal is to inspire, educate and connect women across the technology industry. Organizers state, that their mission is to: “Support the community of women currently working in technology and to help pave the way for women and young women who want to enter the industry.” It isn’t focused only on coding, but it covers all aspects of a tech career. It provides the attendees in hands-on-tech workshops and vivid discussions on the latest technology trends and information
Who should go: The summit is mostly for the girls working on both the technical and business sides of technology. However, the event grants an awesome, harassment-free atmosphere for all attendees, regardless of their gender, orientation, religion, race or age. It gathers women in many different types of careers in tech, not only coding ones, and at every level. The event brings together girls that are students, but also the ones that are senior executives.
Which employer branding goals it fits: Women in Tech Summit empowers an important group of tech professionals. It also teaches about the importance of tech workforce diversity and helps to create a healthy working environment for all employees. It results in enforcement of a brand position as an employer.
Brand Marketing Summit
Date: October 24th – 25th
Place: New York, NY
About the event: The Brand Marketing Summit consists of 3 brand-driven conferences. They focus on 6 core themes which are: the reinvention of marketing, customer understanding and personalized experiences, engagement and story inspiring, attribution and performance, omnichannel marketing, social media marketing. Attendees can meet and listen to representatives of such giants as Adidas, Target, WWE, Hitachi, National Geographic, BASF, Visa, and many more. The Mission Statement of this edition of the summit is: “Marketing is Dead, Engagement is alive.” Thus the whole event focuses on the role of the engagement in brand marketing. It highlights the new technologies role in the process. The main goal is to “reinvent the strategy and engage our customers in new ways.”
Who should go: Marketing Seniors, especially in brand and social media field.
Which employer branding goals it fits: This summit will make your marketing team really, really happy. As it is not just another “conference of “how awesome we are” but a summit that focuses on the brand-driven conferences and actually teaches stuff. It fulfills the classic goals of Employer Branding, such as positive brand attitude with future, potential, existing and previous employees. Besides, don’t you want to be the only company in the neighborhood that actually cares about their Marketing Department? Just kidding. But seriously, don’t you want that?
Web Summit
Date: November 5th – 8th
Place: Lisbon
About the event: Web Summit is the biggest tech conference worldwide and is considered to be the best one. It is the event that grew from the local initiative in 2010 to the event that gathers more than 70 000 attendees and more than 1 200 speakers from all countries. We have already mentioned it as the summit-to-be when it comes to SEO conferences, but it is way more. There are 23 different conferences during the event. Everyone can pick one according to their desires and interests: Talk Robot, SaaS Monster, Pub Summit, binate.io, Content Makers and many more.
Who should go: Mostly the representatives of the senior management. It is also a great opportunity for start-ups to exhibit and be a part of ALPHA 2018. The program connects new businesses with investors and mentors.
Which employer branding goals it fits: As everyone seems to be there, the Web Summit is an event to make some business connections and maybe invest in some new talents. It will help to increase the brand recognition and shorten the recruitment process duration. Plus, spreading the word that the company sends employees to The Event of the tech industry (followed by sharing some photos in the social media channels) will surely result in the increasing number of applications.
Technology networking events
eTail
Date: August 6th – 9th
Place: Boston, MA
About the event: “No commercials. No egos. We cut out the fluff to give you hundreds of strategic takeaways.” eTail is the event that had its first edition back in 1999. It brings together over 100 top-notch speakers with thousands of attendees. Representatives of such brands as Coca-Cola, Disney, Mariott, Yamaha, Amazon and Macy’s attend eTail. The event focuses on technology and aims to help companies to optimize the profits. There is no single theorist among the speakers – only practitioners are invited. The content is all about the growth and education. The participants come from across all branches of the industry – from travel, beauty, arts, electronics and much more. They also vary in sizes – from the Billion dollar club to the start-ups. eTail is a place-to-be for all game changers and open-minded entrepreneurs and executives.
Who should go: Definitely VPs, SVPs and directors, followed by senior managers and managers, mostly from Marketing and eCommerce & Online departments. Also, Data analysts will be glad to be there.
Which employer branding goals it fits: Keeping your employees satisfied and making them representatives of the whole team will raise the spirits. It also decreases absenteeism, sick leave, employee-turnover or -fluctuation. Besides, networking is always a positive factor when it comes to the brand recognition among existing and potential employees.
Open Networking Summit
Date: August 25th – 27th
Place: Amsterdam
About the event: To quote Brad Casemore fo IDC, “ONS is the landmark SDN show right now and it’s a unique show that brings together many different aspects of the industry. It covers telco adoption, cloud adoption, there is more and more discussion of what enterprises of varying sizes—starting with the largest and starting in verticals like financial services—will do with SDN. Of course, the vendors across all those markets are here.” Open Networking Summit is the first open networking event that brings together enterprises, service providers and cloud providers. Everyone present share their learnings, insight, highlight innovation and discuss the future of Open Source Networking, including SDN, NFV, orchestration and the automation of cloud, network, & IoT services.
Who should go: The event becomes a mandatory position in the calendars of most Enterprise CIOs, Carrier CTOs and Cloud Executives that can learn from the use cases presented by industry visionaries and leaders.
Which employer branding goals it fits: This networking event is dense in practical knowledge and real-life use cases. It increases the satisfaction of the company’s executive and thus increases their loyalty to the company. Also, they have a chance to be the faces of the company and share a positive image of the brand as an employer. The extra benefit might be the positive attitude towards the organization. It can result in the higher creativity of employees and thus empowering the whole team.
Inbound 2018
Date: September 4th – 7th
Place: Boston, MA
About the event: 4 Days of non-stop learning – this is how Inbound Conference can be summed up. It’s an event that gathers more than 21 000 attendees from more than 100 countries. According to the organizer, “Inbound is an event that celebrates the human, helpful side of the business.” It is the Place where you will learn many useful things during 200+ educational sessions, about all the latest in marketing, sales, and customer success.
From the keynotes to the session tracks, to the parties and networking this event might appear exactly what your team needs. Spoiler alert: there are also food trucks and parties that will make this event “The Burning Man” of the business events.
Who should go: It’s a great place for specialists and managers from marketing, sales, and customer success departments. In fact, you might also want to attend it!
Which employer branding goals it fits: Developing new connections within the industry not only helps build the brand awareness but might be helpful when it comes to talent hunting. Among the numerous attendees, there might be your future employees! Or partners. Or sponsors… The possibilities are endless.
SaaStock 2018
Date: October 15th – 17th
Place: Dublin
About the event: SaaStock, the premier SaaS conference in Europe, is an event to network in addition to establish a foundation of the relationship with potential investors or… investments. It focuses on building a community of innovators and educators. It brings together SaaS developers that showcase their product with the VC investors and partners and is supported by such companies as SalesForce, G2 Crowd, Gartner, 83 North or Insight Venture Partners.
Who should go: It might be “The best conference for SaaS founders, VCs and Execs in Europe” According to Christopher Janz, Managing Partner at Point Nine Capital. It is the perfect place for founders, executives and decision makers.
Which employer branding goals it fits: Attending this event will definitely boost the brand awareness of every company that will show up. As a popular and very specific networking event, it is also a marvelous element of the recruitment strategy.
VMworld
Date: November 5th – 8th
Place: Barcelona
About the event: Fun, education, certificates and tons of networking – this pretty much sums up this huge event. The main topic is, of course, a technology-driven innovation in every market and industry. The event is prepared, designed and hosted by IT Professionals. It covers all vital issues that may concern this group of attendees. Regardless of the professional path of the attendee, the event will help them discover the technology, learn the trends, and meet the people that actively shape the future of digital business. Take the IT to the brand new level.
Who should go: VMworld is a unique networking opportunity for IT professionals. but also a way to stay current with technology trends and what’s required to ensure digital business success, namely cloud infrastructure and business mobility.
Which employer branding goals it fits: Employee satisfaction and their higher loyalty are the goals that might be increased through the event like VMworld. Remember, that satisfied professionals and specialists are the ones that will advocate the brand as an employer and recommend the workplace to their fellow IT colleagues.
One technology events calendar to satisfy them all
Marketing, sales, customer success and IT are not the only departments in the company. So how can you “kill two birds with one stone” and be a hero for HR and financial departments as well? Start using Eventory Planning and manage team’s event participation more effectively. Cut out the unnecessary chains of emails and spreadsheets. This tool will substitute multiple channels in one agile solution.
Track Team’s preferences and plan ahead to make smarter financial decisions (and yes, I mean early birds). Allocate the event budget so it serves multiple purposes. With every event attended, the platform builds company’s profile to recommend events that fit your team’s preferences best.
Wrap up
Technology conferences, summits and technology networking events are a great place to spread a positive image of a brand as an employer. The connect start-ups with venture capital investors, trainees with CEOs, and businesses with potential candidates. The choice of the right event depends on your goals and KPIs. Some events can serve multiple purposes that will satisfy all parties involved. It is always good to prepare a list of events-to-be and update it from time-to-time.
Also, using the agile technology to coordinate company’s event policy is a good idea. It keeps track of attended events and reduces the unnecessary struggle within the decision process of who will go and where. Platforms like Eventory Planning are a bliss for all people involved in the process: from HR, to specialists, to the CTO. After all, data-driven decisions are the essence of the technology industry.
Let us know, which technology events should also be on the list!
