Everybody wants to succeed at their work. They want to bring forward new ideas that can help their company innovate, and they want to improve their own careers by growing their networks and gathering new ideas. User group conferences are an incredibly valuable way to improve both your company and your career, delivering innumerable opportunities for professional development, creating space to interact with peers, and providing new ways to approach the industry’s most difficult questions.

Here are five ways that you can gain tremendous value from user group conferences:

1. Network and Build Relationships

Converse with those who have similar goals and confront the same industry questions. You can discuss the problems you’ve faced with the vendor holding the conference, working with experts to decode possible solutions and next steps.

2. Learn Best Practices from Industry Peers

Take the opportunity to listen to presentations from your peers on the success they’ve experienced, the problems they’ve run into, and how they are utilizing the vendor’s product. By listening to your peers, you’ll be equipped with best practices and lessons learned to take back to your company.

3. Discover New Product Versions/Releases

You’ll also have the opportunity to learn about what the vendor is working on and what new products or product versions they will be releasing. With this knowledge, you can see how future releases will integrate into your current projects and how your company can take advantage of them.

4. Engage with Partner Companies

Partner companies provide a great deal of additional value, helping with product implementation, change management, or providing other complementary products. Have conversations with these partners, figuring out how to capitalize on their product or service offerings as well.

5. Take Part in Product Demonstrations

Everybody wants to be able to test-drive new products. Take the opportunity to get your hands on the product, testing it, asking questions about it, and gaining insight into how best to utilize it at your company.

This is the 11^th year that we’ll be holding our Reflexis user group conference, Reflexions, for our customers and prospective customers. Reflexions is an experience where retailers can gain all of this value, networking, engaging in product demonstrations, listening to valuable presentations from retail peers, and discovering best practices and lessons learned.

We look forward to Reflexions every year because it delivers exactly what our customers need: insights that help them improve their retailer’s store and labor operations, and the networking and industry expertise that advances their personal career.

For information about Reflexis’ user group conference, Reflexions 2018, read more here!