Last week, Lew McMurran, the VP of Government Affairs for the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) spoke to our entrepreneurship class. He discussed a bit of his background, and then proceeded to talk about the WTIA. He is the longest serving employee for the association, which allows businesses to band together and offers them services, events and programs, and advocacy and lobbying. It was created in 1984 with a small government grant to talk about issues/find venture capitalists and employees. The have worked to provide reasonable health care coverage to the businesses in the association, and hold events to benefit the technology field. They currently have around 600 members (or 10% of the market).
This association seems like something very advantageous to the computing professional. Although they focus mainly on tech based businesses, the events that they hold seem like great opportunities to make connections and find jobs within the industry. The most interesting event that McMurran spoke about was the "crawl" that they have done in the past. This is similar to a pub crawl, but they visit a handful of businesses in the tech industry instead of pubs (yet he did mention that there was still a fair bit of drinking, which is not surprising). I'm going to be keeping an eye on their website and hope that another crawl takes place soon, because it sounds like a great way to see what kind of environment some of the software companies in the area have, which is of great interest to me (soon graduating and entering the job market). Also, I will be utilizing wtiajobs.org, which has a listing of jobs from the companies that are members. This will be another useful resource for finding my future job.
