By Randy Johnston
How do you stay on top of your professional game? Reading daily email news summaries? Professional journals? Peers in the office? Conferences and other CPE education? While each of these activities can provide insight, there is no place that summarizes computer technology better than your own state’s technology conference. The independent advice, the direct application to professional accounting, and the insights of trends in the market are presented in a succinct fashion in keynote and breakout sessions again this year.
What Are the Learning Opportunities?
The plenary sessions are designed to provide insight on key issues including personal privacy, productivity boosters, Excel’s best new features, and an overview of all technologies with Tech Update. Whether you make the decisions for an entire organization or simply for yourself, there will be content in each of these sessions you can use today as well as in the future. For example, Tech Update will cover new generation communications such as 5G and Wi-Fi 6, the next generation of wireless. You’ll use these technologies in your office and home in the near future. While security is a concern for most users of computer technology, the impact on you personally is probably greater than you perceive. We’ll provide examples of personal information that has already been exposed and identify how cybercriminals exploit personal information. More important, like all K2 CPE classes, we’ll show you how to practically address the problem and how to “cleanse” your public profiles.
While many of you have attended both the technology conference and all-day CPE classes in the past, the K2 team always brings something new to every course. This year’s conference includes three sessions on various advanced Excel topics including Excel’s Power Query, the new artificial intelligence features, as well as some of the best new features of Excel 2019. Beyond that, we have coverage of Power BI to help with your advanced reporting needs.
If you have specialty interests from accounting software to CPA firm management to sales tax, we have individual sessions that focus on each of these specific topics. The authors and instructors know that your time and money is valuable, and we want to provide direct guidance that you can apply when you return to your office. Our rule is that we want to save you more money than you spend on registration fees, and to help you gain the time back that you have spent out of the office with us within 30 days. While all our instructors have 10+ years of experience and are among the most highly rated speakers in the country, many are consultants with 30+ years of experience in their areas of expertise.
This year’s conference also includes sessions on technology that you may think you understand but you don’t have current knowledge to leverage the nuances of technology you own or are considering. Examples here include virtual technologies to support remote workers, PDF tools, blockchain and other emerging technologies, the dark web, and personal technologies for your home and office. Our team routinely buys, tries and digs into features and functions to explain how you can use technology products saving you time trying to understand these technologies by doing your own research and experimentation. Most important today is how you can separate the facts from the sales pitch.
And We’re Not Done Yet…
Members learn from other members. Only at a live event can you have a conversation during a break or over lunch about a business issue that’s on your mind. The technology conference gives you the opportunity to renew old friendships, make new ones and re-establish contact with your state society advocates. Besides, getting out of the office and into a learning environment for two days is a great way to recharge your batteries, and gain insights to use in your business and personal life.
We believe that you’ll learn something new, have the opportunity to meet vendors at their exhibits, have the chance to be entered in drawings for prizes, and most important, have one of your best CPE experiences of the year. We look forward to seeing you at this year’s TechFest Summer Conference!
Randy Johnston is a shareholder in K2 Enterprises, LLC, a leading provider of CPE to state CPA societies. He also owns Network Management Group, Inc., a managed services provider that provides around-the-clock support from Boston to Honolulu. Concepts for this article were extracted from the 2019 K2 Technology Conference materials and from Johnston’s own experience working with technology at various firms in the U.S. Ask for help at NMGI by emailing [email protected] or calling 620-664-6000.