I have been in workers’ compensation for more than 30 years, and somehow, this year was the first time I attended WCI.
I’m still asking myself, what took me so long?
Before heading to Orlando, I knew WCI was a big conference. I had heard about the thousands of attendees, the hundreds of educational sessions and the enormous exhibit hall, but I don’t think you can really appreciate the magnitude of it until you walk through the doors. There were so many people to see and so many sessions to choose from that, at first, I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to navigate it all.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to worry about it nearly as much as I thought I would.
One of the things that surprised me most was how quickly a conference of that size began to feel familiar. I knew quite a few people already, and everywhere I turned, I seemed to run into another familiar face. With Mark Pew and Bob Wilson by my side, I met a lot of people I had never crossed paths with before, and those conversations quickly turned into connections and, in some cases, new friendships.
WCI is certainly a large conference, but the workers’ compensation community is still surprisingly small. You can walk into a room with thousands of people and discover that you know someone, have mutual friends with the person sitting beside you or have worked with someone in the room at some point over the last 30 years. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the people were going to be every bit as important as the sessions.
That realization probably shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, relationships have always been one of the things I value most about this industry. We may work for different companies, represent different sides of a claim or have very different perspectives on how the system should work, but there is a shared connection that comes from spending years in workers’ compensation.
At WCI, I saw that connection everywhere.
I also found myself thinking about how much this industry has changed during the 30-plus years I’ve been part of it. Technology has changed. The way we communicate has changed. The complexity of the system has certainly changed. And yet, the importance of people and relationships remains.
If anything, a conference like WCI reinforces how important they are.
There is something pretty special about being surrounded by people who understand the strange language we speak every day. You can start a conversation with someone you’ve never met, mention a workers’ compensation issue that would make most people’s eyes glaze over, and suddenly you’re solving our world’s problems. You don’t have to explain why it matters because they already understand.
I went to WCI thinking I would come home with new ideas and information, and I certainly did. But I also came home with new relationships, look forward to continued conversations , and a renewed appreciation for the people who make up this industry.
After returning home, I kept coming back to the same question: Why did it take me more than 30 years to attend this conference?
I still don’t have a particularly good answer, but I feel the need to hang my head in shame over my faux pas.
I came to WCI expecting to be overwhelmed by the size of the conference, and I was. What I didn’t expect was how quickly that feeling would be replaced by a sense of connection. I was reminded just how much knowledge and experience exists within this industry, but I was equally reminded that the real value of a conference like WCI isn’t just what you learn in a session. It’s the people you meet, the conversations, the old friends you reconnect with and the new relationships you begin.
After 30 years in this industry, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the workers’ compensation community. My first WCI reminded me that there is always more to learn, more people to meet and more stories to hear.
I’m already looking forward to going back.
And next time, I’ll have a much better idea of where I’m going and plan enough time for the ad hoc conversation on the way there.
