Are free seminars worth it?

Anyone that has been following my tweets or linked-in status will have noticed that I've upped my attendance at seminars, briefings, exhibitions, etc. recently.

I was asked by one of my friends how I am finding these seminars and instead of replying directly I thought I'd blog about it (as a new blogger I haven't really got the knack yet of jumping into text to schedule, I need an idea to get me started).

The short answer is that they are well worthwhile, there isn't a single one of the recent sessions I've been to that I didn't get something out of.

But as they say, "you don't get nowt for nowt", you have to aware of the motives of the organisers.

For instance I went to a briefing from Gartner and half of it described what was going on in the area and the other half was a "and here's how we can help you". I didn't mind the sales pitch as it wasn't that overt.

Associations and alumni events are usually neutral (I've attended ones by AMBA, BCS and Strathclude University Business School), although perhaps not as pointed and focused and leading edge as they could be as they are aimed at a more generalist audience.

Government sponsored events are good to see where there is focus and so likely to be public money and consequently business opportunities, it Britain there is a Knowledge Transfer program. I went to a Digital Communications KT event, very interesting, although it almost seemed like a clique attends them.

User groups are also good. I'm a member of the Scottish Test Group and their sessions cover the width of the activity so there's always been stuff of interest.

But if you have an area of interest you can find sessions and gain a huge amount of info. I wanted to pick up a bit more info on Agile, from the BCS I learnt about the Agile Way of Thinking, from Scottish Test Group I learnt about Test Driven Development (TDD), from Agile Scotland I got a more techy view of TDD and over the next week or two I'll get an overview of Agile from the Rational User Group (I'm not a member but its open and I expect a bit of sales pitch from IBM but that's OK) and a much more techy set of info about TDD from Scottish Developers.
If you are willing to put in the time you can get info and widen your knowledge on what's going on.

And often its the audience that provides the best comments. The Test Manager at Dell in Glasgow made the comment that it was the next generation of TDD based on requirements that she was after and it wasn't there yet and as that lines up exactly with what I was looking for, it shows me that there is a real desire to take TDD further and so this is an are I will keep an eye on.