Day 2: ASSE Professional Development Conference

Monday, June 25, 2007

The Opening General Session started at 7:45 am, which meant that the other invited speakers and I needed to be in the “green room” just after 7:00 am. The President brings fraternal greeting to the opening ceremonies. I will try to post the video of the greeting and if not I will at least post a copy of my notes so you can get an idea of my address. It was a wonderful opportunity to introduce CSSE and their representation to the general ASSE public. The feedback was very positive and it was the basis of many new discussions and relationships.

There are more than 200 sessions that offer a wealth of information offered at the conference. Sessions include: training, organization successes, opportunities for improvement, to a variety of methodologies and tools. Wayne Glover and I divided up some of the sessions to ensure better coverage and allowed us to review many more speakers that could be considered for our PDC program. Having both of us at the conference also allowed us to have more conversations with key people from both ASSE and IOSH to further our relationships and explore future possibilities.

As with any conference you have some sessions with good presenters, some with good content experts, some with people who are both and some with neither. I had a few from every category but took something away from each of them. I attended one session that particularly stood out in my mind; it was a session with Keith Robinson who spoke to environmental compliance for those who have both a safety and an environmental role. It was good basic to intermediate information that you could truly walk away with and use. As we advance with our PDCs are there certain topics that we should include more than we have in the past?