Volunteering at conferences is a higher step of interest than just being an attendee. As a volunteer, it gives you an inside opportunity to get to meet everyone else. When you have volunteer meetings, you get close to the group of volunteers that year, and when you’re out at the conference, people come up to you with questions and you develop a little bit more of a friendship with that person, versus just coming in, sitting down, and moving on. I find that there is a really great opportunity to not only help, but network with other people.
Over the years, we [volunteers] have developed a relationship to the point where we text each other to make sure that we have already registered for conferences, to make sure we’re going to go, to find out what we’re going to do. When we’re [at the conference], we get to develop that relationship, we get to hang out, talk about family. We’ve done a lot of extra activities with this group of friends we’ve developed that are outside the field of IT security or technology, which has been really nice.
One of the pluses of being part of this is that people from all over the world will come to the North America conferences. At first, I was kind of surprised. We’ve met people from Japan, Australia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Egypt, Curacao, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil. We as attendees have the opportunity to network with those individuals and learn how they do things in their countries, like regulations.
When we were in Anaheim last year [for North America CACS], another friend from Canada and I went out with a friend from Egypt, and he took us to an Egyptian diner. He looked up the place, we went there, he explained the food. He said that he was happy to share his culture with ours, and he ordered all the food and hookah, and he didn’t let us pay. And we were like, no, come on, you can’t do that! And he said no, I want you guys to experience this. It was a really nice experience. It’s a relationship you form with people that goes beyond work. We were not talking about work in that moment – we were talking about families, friends, what we like doing.
It’s been really interesting to meet the people who do the same work we do but might be at different levels, or different types of leaders. It’s a different opportunity than you’d get on LinkedIn. You get on social media and try to connect to people, and they think you’re going to scam them. They’re defensive. If I go and connect with someone out of nowhere, he might be like, what does this guy want from me?
[Being a member] opens the communication with somebody at a senior position, not only people from different countries but senior leaders—CEOs, presidents, people who belong to boards—where you would otherwise not have the opportunity to just walk up to them and ask them something. At a conference, you can walk up to them and introduce yourself and say you have a question for them. Normally, unless you run into that person in an elevator and have that 30-second speech prepared, you don’t get that one-on-one. But ISACA gives you that opportunity to meet with other leaders, mentors that can help guide you and help you make a decision, career-wise.
