Conferences Are Golden Opportunities
If you haven't taken the time to attend any of these OSH conferences, you're missing a golden opportunity to learn and network.
- By Jerry Laws
- Jul 01, 2015
My family and friends won't believe it, based on my frequent complaints about air travel, but I do enjoy attending OSH conferences. I encounter many friends, usually make valuable new contacts, and learn a lot from experienced safety and health professionals whom I know well or am meeting for the first time. Often I confirm articles that I need from experts at their expo booths or just from chance meetings during lunch, while walking through an expo, or after a presentation. These events are ideal, even crucial, for me. Looking back, I believe they have been essential to whatever success I've had as the editor of this magazine for the past two decades—and I know that I haven't thanked the professional associations' staffers and officers enough for presenting them year after year.
Coming home from AIHce 2015 and Safety 2015, I can report that both were outstanding events—truly the most enjoyable and most productive that I've attended in these series. Both came with a bonus: AIHce took place in beautiful, walkable Salt Lake City, which I hadn't visited in more than 50 years, while ASSE's Safety 2015 was in Dallas, where I work. My easiest conference travel ever! Fortunately, this meeting arrived after May's torrential rains here had ended.
Thousands of safety and health professionals attend these and many other important conferences, including NFPA, VPPPA, A+A, AOHC, annual meetings of ISEA and the International Glove Association, and many others. If you haven't taken the time to attend any of these, you're missing a golden opportunity to learn and network.
This article originally appeared in the July 2015 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.
About the Author
Jerry Laws is Editor of Occupational Health & Safety magazine, which is owned by 1105 Media Inc.