How To Use International Call Conferencing for Professional Development
International call conferencing can expose your team to thought leaders from within, or even outside of, your industry is an excellent way to help them grow professionally. However, sending multiple individuals to conferences can quickly become cost-prohibitive. Not only do you have conference registration fees you also have airfare, lodging, transportation, and other expenses. In addition, each person will miss several days of work, which has costs of its own to consider.
Bringing in speakers is a great alternative, but it can be costly, too. You’ll need to pay the speaker’s consulting fee, which could cost thousands of dollars, and potentially airfare and lodging. You’ll incur other costs such as catering and meeting space rental charges. That said, it’s a one-to-many presentation, so your entire team will benefit. What if the speaker is willing but unavailable to travel to you? What if the speaker is from another country and hesitant to make an overseas trip?
While attending a presentation in person is wonderful, it’s not always practical or cost effective. Fortunately, there’s another way that’s extremely affordable, interactive, and easy for everyone involved: international conferencing for professional development.
Here’s how it works:
- Find a speaker — You invite a speaker to present a topic to your team, but rather than delivering the presentation in person, ask the speaker to join you in an audio conference call. Once the speaker realizes the time commitment is much less than if she had to travel to your location, she might be open to lowering her fee accordingly. For example, rather than two or three days away from home (or more if she must travel internationally), her time commitment might be just one or two hours.
- Schedule the global conference call — Once you’ve lined up a speaker and scheduled the time, schedule the global conference call and invite your attendees. Since it’s a virtual presentation, you could even open the conference call to other branch offices, enabling a larger audience to benefit from your efforts. With our global conferencing solution, your audience and the speaker can join your call from virtually any phone in the world using a local or toll-free access number that’s local to their countries.
- Record the global conference call — Recording the conference call is a simple matter of pressing a couple of buttons during the call, so make sure to do that. You’ll receive an MP3 recording of the call soon after it concludes, thus enabling you to distribute the professional development presentation to absentees as well as save it to your training library or knowledge base. Not only will your attendees and absentees benefit from the presentation, but your future employees can also do so as well by listening to the recording.
International Call Conferencing Cost
The cost of the global conference call will be a fraction of the cost of hosting a live presentation, and the benefits will continue for long after the live event.
