Power Up at AU 2011!
For a small group of people at Autodesk, Autodesk University (AU) is a year-round project. As the Content Manager for AU, I am part of this group, and one of the most difficult parts of my job is now coming to an end. Every year, after we contact everyone who submits a proposal, my in-box gets flooded both with emails from speakers thanking me and with emails from many people whose sessions did not get accepted. This year, because of the record number of submissions (2,388) from a record number of potential presenters (1,118), the number of submissions we were unable to accommodate was significantly higher. While answering the “Why didn’t I get accepted…” and “How can I get accepted next year…” questions, I became aware that the AU selection process is perceived as a mystery and not well understood. It is not a mystery—it is a numbers game and all submissions have to fit into the curriculum plan. In an effort to clear the confusion, this post explains how class selections are made.
The AU Philosophy
AU first and foremost is a learning event. People learn to become more proficient with specific products they know and learn about those they haven't used yet. AU covers what’s happening in the industry and the big trends that will affect customers in the future. We want the learning experience at AU to focus not only on latest product feature training but also to inspire attendees to work more efficiently and, in many cases, differently. The AU tag line, LEARN CONNECT EXPLORE, was deliberately crafted to describe the full interactive learning experience that AU represents.
Content Briefs
The selection process for content starts with a Content Brief created by each track manager in February. At a high level, the Content Brief outlines the main topics that we want to see covered in each track or for each product at AU. Technologists throughout the company are also interviewed to learn what they think is important for our customers to know about. AU members are what topics they would like to learn about and what topics they would like Autodesk executives to cover at AU. The input from those three sources results in the topics list you see here. This information was then posted to the Call for Proposals (CFP) website to encourage and guide submissions around these topics.
Topic-Specific Submissions
The encouragement worked. Not only did we receive a record number of submissions, we received many great ones tailored to what we asked for on the CFP website. Some topics resonated more than others. For example, there were close to 600 submissions for Autodesk® Revit® Architecture alone. Within all those submissions, many were specific to families, visualization, or other topics listed on the CFP site. With only approximately 60 slots allocated to Revit Architecture, we could accept only about 10 percent of the Revit Architecture submissions. Revit Architecture was extreme in the number of proposals, but most tracks had 2 to 3 times the submissions than we were able to accept. Many times we had several good submissions on same topic and we were not able to accept some stellar presenters.
Selecting Top Presenters
We are also very careful about the selection of presenters as well as content. Attendees rate speakers at the end of each sessions, and we take those ratings very seriously. We are committed to having the highest-quality speakers and when speakers are rated highly, they obviously have an advantage over first-time speakers. We feel that this care is fully justified given the time and expense incurred by attendees—not just in terms of attending AU but also in not being at their jobs for 3 to 5 days—and it is our duty to ensure the highest possible quality experience for every attendee.
Ensuring Product Balance
Autodesk products play an important role in many industries and Autodesk University is the place where users from all those industries come together to share experiences and to peek over each other’s shoulder. The content offered has to strike a balance against the entire Autodesk product portfolio. AU will offer over 50 sessions at any given time during the three days of AU, and space is allocated to ensure every attendee will find several classes in their industry or in their area of interest. For this year’s AU, we have designed a learning experience that features topics that reflect requests from AU members as well as the advice received from the AU track leads and technologists. AU this year will have over 900 classes, presented by 620 presenters. I wish we could accept more sessions but we are confident that customers at AU 2011, whether attending in person or virtually, will have another great learning experience.
