BRIDGE Happy Hour is a Hit!
Surprise, surprise. Giving away food, drinks, and a mini-laptop was incentive enough to bring over 100 people out to our Young IT Professionals Happy Hour on April 16th. We were pleased to see how many people stayed to socialize long after we did the drawing for the laptop and the McFadden’s gift certificates. The opportunity to meet other young people in the IT industry was clearly as strong a pull as the invitation of free food and drinks.
One of the main goals of our Happy Hour was to address part of the RI Tech Community (recent graduates and new members of the workforce) that rarely get out to networking events. Networking events can be intimidating, especially for young professionals. With that in mind, we were particularly thrilled to see all the new faces: a few people who are regulars at ProvGeeks and TechCollective events all mentioned how refreshing it was to come to an event where they hardly knew anyone. I kept walking up to groups of people and asking how they’d heard about the event. One of the most common ways was through RINexus, which is clearly a site that the RI IT community admires and follows.
Regardless of where our attendees heard about the event, it was great to see that the turnout included a variety of companies and professionals all getting together to enjoy Happy Hour (or three hours) with us. We were pleased to meet so many great new people at the event and we engaged in some really wonderful conversations throughout the evening. We also had a chance to catch up with some young IT professionals we had successfully placed in companies throughout Rhode Island, along with people we have known for the past few years who were nice enough to come out and support our efforts. The laidback atmosphere at McFadden’s seemed to be a great space for mingling and we noticed there were many people who didn’t know each other and had a chance to make connections.
Thank you to everyone who participated in our online survey and congratulations to our winners of the night Barsha, Aura, and Chris! We are looking forward to sharing our survey results with you very soon!
Overall, our happy hour proved there is an audience for these types of events. We’d like to help build the community and provide younger IT professionals with networking opportunities. People kept asking if we were going to have another event. The reality is that holding regular events like our Happy Hour is unsustainable – we can’t give away a laptop every month, but everyone had a great time and we are looking forward to hosting more events in the future to get IT professionals together. Thank you to everyone for making our event a success and keep an eye out for our next events! Until then, don’t be shy – drop us an email and let us know what you think.
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