tcworld India 2017: Focus on the future

Positive, optimistic, energetic. Once again, the tcworld India conference in Bangalore did not disappoint.

Akash Dubey opens the tcworld India conference

The first thing that I noticed was that this event is colorful. Professional attire ranges from jeans and tech company T shirts to suits and pantsuits (that’s me) over into saris and kurtas in all possible colors. Combine that with a five-star venue and you have a visually compelling event. (There are hundreds of photos available on the TWIN Facebook page if you want to really see what I mean.)

I kicked off the conference with a keynote about future-proofing your career.

[slideshare id=72777209&doc=futureproofingyourcareer-170303144110]

Main points:

• You can control some aspects of your career and not others.
• Your career opportunities are governed by your network, your reputation, and your skills. You need some of each of these to succeed. (Great skills plus zero network means you will have trouble finding available jobs.)
• The more constraints you put on your career, the more difficult it is to succeed. Constraints include location, salary requirements, work/life balance, and the like.

I found out that portions of the keynote were broadcast on Facebook Live via (of course) a Facebook message from a family member, who was watching from many time zones away. Still trying to decide whether that’s awesome or creepy. Maybe a bit of both?

As usual, I got side-tracked by discussions in the hallway and only made it to a few sessions. I tried to capture session content on Twitter. Try the #tcworldIndia2017 and #tcworldIndia17 hashtags.

On day two, I had a longer presentation on future-proofing your content.

[slideshare id=72777230&doc=futureproofingyourcontent-170303144133]

Here, I returned to one of my favorite concepts, the digital text cycle, and mapped the phases of the cycle against best practices to ensure that your content will be usable in the future. In summary: Don’t get locked into any particular approach. You need flexibility to ensure that you can accommodate future requirements.

And then, all too soon, it was time to pack up and head back home.

Many thanks to the organizers at tcworld and TWIN, especially Akash Dubey and Ritu Gupta, for another great event.