Blog Post: Highlights from the AZ SHRM State Conference

The 2009 Arizona SHRM State Conference has been an exciting event this week with great keynote speakers and fantastic breakout sessions.  With this year’s theme, “HR Shines in Tough Times” our community of Arizona HR Professionals are wrapping up the conference with not only new concepts and ideas to build upon but also with great solutions that can be implemented effectively in our workplaces.

The pre-conference was jam packed with HRCI credits to get the conference rolling.  We had engaging breakout sessions from the “Extreme Leadership Roundtable” with 4 strategic credits in the morning session, to “Driving HR Strategy with Human Capital Analytics” in the afternoon among many other wonderful breakout sessions.

Kicking off the general conference was Clint Swindall with his engaging question of “Tell Me Somethin’ Good,” that helps us to build positive conversations to overcome employee disengagement.  Continuing with Dan Heath showing us how to make ideas stick for maximum business impact and closing out Wednesday’s keynote speakers with Susan Brooks inspiring us to courageous and highly contagious leadership as an HR Professional.

Wednesday evening was followed up with a celebration at the “HR Community Networking Mixer” that was hosted by Jobing.com, Arizona SHRM State Conference Committee, GET and the Matador Restaurant.  Great prizes such as sporting event tickets, gift cards and many more prizes were donated by GET and the Matador Restaurant provided yummy appetizers for attendees!

Thursday was a wrap up in the Exhibitor Hall with great vendors such as Bernard Hodes Group, Clarifacts, DuffyGroup, Jobing.com, Outplacing.com, SCF Arizona and Take Charge America just to name a few of the many vendors that exhibited at this year’s conference.  The exhibit hall was a great place for HR Professionals to learn about all the current and new products and services that can help them improve their HR efforts and strategies.

With the tag team keynote speakers Bob Romano and Barb Sanfilippo, they sparked our Thursday morning with High Definition People, rocking the house with their Disco Inferno act to ignite passion and experience life!  Steve Farber closed out our afternoon with “Greater Than Yourself,” what it means to be a leader of substance and influence.

Closing out our Arizona SHRM State Conference on Friday morning will be Neil Alexander with the Employment Law Update, followed by a super keynote speaker, John Foley of High Performance Climb, who was a former Navy carrier pilot to Lead Solo of the Blue Angles Flight Demonstration Team.

If you did not get an opportunity to join us this year at the Arizona SHRM State Conference, be sure to mark your calendar to attend next year’s 2010 Arizona SHRM State Conference for another great conference!