The day after I started work in January, I put in a vacation request for the days around the Conference, on the grounds that if I passed my six-month probation, I'd have enough accrued vacation to take the last ten days of July off. It was approved, I passed probation, and I went, on my own nickel.

When I got back, I wrote up a formal trip-report: what tutorials and sessions I had taken, with a couple of salient bullet points for each one listing what I had learned; what hall-way conversations I was involved in; the vender presentations I took (again with bullet points); BOF sessions (ditto). I sent the draft off to my boss for approval, and then published it to the company at large.

I took the three most useful points and started applying them to my work. When next January rolled around, I put in my vacation request. I was able to demonstrate to my boss that there had been a measurable benefit from my previous conference attendence. With out prompting, he offered to split the cost of the conference registration.

Repeat Performance.

The third year the company picked up the full cost of the conference, tutorials, and lodging. The accountants and I had a discussion, they wanted me to fly; I was going to ride the motorcycle, thank you, but you can pay for mileage.... I won. At that Conference I got into a hallway conversation on Monday with a couple of Apache Developers about a Serious Sore Spot my company was running into. They sent a patch from the Conference on Tuesday evening; we applied at the shop on Wednesday morning, verified that it fixed our bug, and the patch was formally submitted to the Developement Community on Friday.

Last year, all my boss had to say to the Powers That Be was 'The Apache Bug', and they approved sending up to five people to the conference and covering the cost of one tutorial each.

You have to be able to show that there is a benefit to the company in sending people off to conferences for education. Once you can quantify that benefit, you have a very strong argument with Management.

Also consider presenting; you get a discount on the Conference; the Company gets publicity to a finely targeted audience. ("There will be two thousand of the brightest Perl/Linux/Open Source Developers on the planet there...."); and the Conference gets a paper/seminar/tutorial/BOF. A win for all concerned.

Do you home-work, do your documentation, and be persistent.

it's rather about finding a boss that already thinks that way.

i don't know why it's so hard to find such people. a YAPC isn't too expensive.

I have never worked at a company where they sent me to a YAPC/workshop without me bugging them "Please let me go there".

To get work to pay, think about it in business case terms: will the long term financial benefit of attending (in motivation and work-contentment terms as well as improved skill and productivity) outweigh the immediate financial cost of attending?

Sure, employers often send employees on what appear to be entirely pointless training courses (mandated customer service courses run by people who wouldn't recognise a customer if they were bitten by one, for example), but they perceive some definite benefit from this. At least there's a defined objective (improving ones customer skills in the example), where the learning objective of conferences tends to be rather more vague.

There's also the argument that attendance at a perl conference is likely to be cheaper than attendance of an MS approved MCSD course ;-)

At this point in space and time, many Perl people are in a situation where they find getting employed is hard enough, chosing the right boss is out of the question.

While to some extent that might seem a "point of view", it really isn't easy at this time and place - though getting better.

Cheers, Sören

PS: I get sent to Perl workshops though, lucky me.

I'm sure the IT manager would let me go to a Perl conference, but I'm not so sure that the branch manager would approve of the expenses.

Why not? If you can't give specifics of why it's useful for you to go, why should the boss send drop $2-5K on sending you?

There's nothing wrong with explaining the business value of such things.

True, but sometimes it doesn't really matter how hard you try to explain. Some bosses (and employees too, unfortunately) seem to be so concentrated in production and results that they can't seem to see the other factors that influence those very things, such as the training and motivation workers get.

I don't mean it's pointless to try to convince your boss, I just mean that it's *much* easier if you have a boss who doesn't need to be convinced.

I think you want to phrase this the other way around: if you have an overly bottom-line-conscious boss, no amount of explanation will convince him of the value of sending you to conferences.

That it’s easiest to convince the boss if the boss is already convinced is, well, a truism…

Makeshifts last the longest.