The Power of Our Community

November 14, 2024 | By Emily Matzelle

The Power of Community Life today seems busier than it was even a few short years ago. Business professionals are tasked with meeting their organizational goals while elevating their own skills, keeping pace with the competition while creating a culture of collaboration and balancing it all with self-care and giving back. It’s difficult to tick all of those boxes on your own—and fortunately, you don’t have to.

When you are part of a community, you can learn from others and lean on others. In our community it all starts with networking. When you attend meetings and events and talk to new people, you build connections that can provide the insights and information you need to help you grow your business and your career.

Through networking and mentoring, our community can help you:

Meet your business goals
Elevate your personal skills
Differentiate yourself within the industry
Create a culture of collaboration

Meeting Organizational Goals

Members say networking is one of the greatest benefits of belonging to the community. With a wide variety of peer groups to join, you can connect to fellow MSPs and solution providers, vendors, distributors and other channel professionals for knowledge sharing, valuable partnerships and increased visibility in the industry that are all critical for building a professional networking and meeting your business goals.

“This community levels the playing field for all of us in tech because they put everybody in the same room,” said Carrie Green, senior vice president of operations at Alt-Tech and winner of the 2024 North America Community Leadership award. “There’s nobody that you can’t talk to and everybody’s willing to help.”

Start by engaging with your regional group. This means attending virtual and in-person meetings and events to address challenges important or unique to your situation or geography. As a member, you’ll automatically be connected with your regional group:

ANZ (Australia and New Zealand)
ASEAN (Southeast Asia)
Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg)
DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland)
North America (United States and Canada)
UK & Ireland

Meeting and event registration is free for members and anyone in your company can attend. See upcoming meetings and events.

Elevating Your Own Skills

Professional development is important, but often gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list. If you can tie professional development into your organizational goals, you’re more likely to take action. Whether it be improving your public speaking or presentation skills, building a social media presence, finding new business, learning how to advocate for yourself or something else, connecting with real people can sometimes be more valuable than a course.

“One of my professional development goals was to find a mentor,” said Annie Hills, director, strategic marketing at GreatAmerica Financial Services. She signed up to participate in the first cohort of the Community Mentorship Program and was paired up immediately.

“One of the first things we talked about was the importance of having a sponsor—which is someone a few levels above you in the organization that can speak for you when you’re not in the room,” Hills said. “Having that gave me confidence and I’m really grateful for the program.”

Looking for a mentor? Sign up for the next cohort.

Keeping Pace with the Industry

Members will tell you that this group is welcoming, friendly and willing to share. There isn’t a topic that’s off limits and members believe in the power of collective knowledge sharing to benefit the industry as a whole. That means you benefit from visibility into what others are doing, including what’s working and what’s not.

Conversations are a bit part of our meetings and events, but that’s not the only place to talk. Online discussion groups give members a place to connect between in-person meetings and online events. Members work on industry initiatives, start conversations about specific areas of business and technology, and access resources and information.

Start chatting. Online discussion groups are available on the community app (Apple Store or Google Play) and on your desktop.

Creating a Culture of Collaboration

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander and members are moving forward conversations on important technology topics that affect us all through specific interest groups. Each regional group offers interest groups where members can engage more deeply on topics of interest. Current interest groups in your region may include:

Advancing Women in Technology (AWIT): Focused on the issues, challenges and opportunities for women pursuing and advancing in tech careers
Cybersecurity: Focused on helping tech businesses strengthen and build cybersecurity strategy and resilience
DEI: Focused on technology workforce issues, including diversity, equity and inclusion
Emerging Technology: Focused on identifying business use cases for innovative technologies including AI, blockchain, data and internet of things (IoT)
Managed Services: Focused on sharing best practices and strategies for MSPs

New groups representing additional regions are always being considered. For current information of member groups, visit connect.comptia.org.

Join Us at the CompTIA Community Forum (CCF) 2025

The CompTIA Community Forum (CCF) 2025 is the perfect place to see everything our community has to offer. Don’t miss this opportunity to contribute your ideas and create the partnerships that help shape the future. CCF provides an opportunity to learn how you can get involved and better utilize your membership to help your technology business grow. There’s a place for everyone—from MSPs and solution providers to cybersecurity evangelists and technology vendors and distributors and beyond!

Save the date! CompTIA Community Form (CCF) 2025, March 10-12 in Chicago