The 44th annual Black Data Professional Association Technology Conference, one of the nation’s leading technology inclusion conferences, is back and taking place virtually as well as in-person from Aug. 18 through Aug. 20 in Atlanta. If you are looking to get into the tech world, or looking to network and develop your skills, this is the place to be.
Timothy Butts, the national operations vice president of the BDPA, spoke with rolling out about the conference and what to expect this year.
For people who don’t know, what is the BDPA?
BDPA stands for Black Data Professional Association. We are the technologists that have been around since 1975, and the organization is in its 47th year. BDPA is here to celebrate where we have been and where we are going. Those of you who are in STEM, [if] you’re a tech business, you should be coming down to visit us at this conference.
How does someone get involved with this conference?
I would say they should start by visiting our career fair this week. If they want to log into our website for the conference, they could go to www.conference.bdpa.org. By going there, they’re going to get a glance into what we’re doing, they can register for the career fair, and then meet the different vendors who are interested in people like them who are interested in STEM. A lot of companies want to staff up, so by doing that, they can get the opportunity to get the real-time frontline opportunities for interviews. On our website, they can get a really good connection with some of our partners like Google, who during our career fair, are going to do real-time free certification and cloud computing.
How has the tech world grown over the years?
For us to accelerate how we do business, we need technology. What we used to do is not scalable by doing things such as writing things down, so we have to take it to the next level. The same way we moved from typewriters to keyboards is the same way we have to move with our mindset. We moved from a single computer to network computers, up to the worldwide web computers. All that networking makes all of it more efficient, and it’s only going to accelerate even more. I like to say technology enables business, so that’s part of why we just move with it. We try to uplift the students that are in our groups. That way, as they reach the senior levels and can be strategic, they can use technology to accelerate and enable the business to help all of society, and we’re the ones here to help teach the Black community how to get it done, but also to support them, and make sure they know we got their back.
