Plan Early

 

The first thing you should do is discuss this with your supervisor at work.  Often times, if you are presenting a paper, the company will sponsor your expenses to the conference.  This chance of sponsorship increases dramatically if he paper is about the history of the company or one of its programs, projects, or products.  In industry, because the conference is in January, most of the expenses will be on the previous year’s budget.  That means it must be planned into the budget the year before that (two years out).  The most common rejection response is “I’d like to send you, but it is not in the department budget.”  Thus start the process early enough to insure that it gets in the budget.

 

This will require you to determine when and where the conference will take place, the cost of conference registration, travel, lodging, and unless you are using personal leave, the cost of your wages while traveling and at the conference.

 

Set a schedule

Frequently, young professionals don’t really have control of their own time at work.  They are thrown on short deadline projects, and moved around in such a way that it is difficult for them to maintain a steady project of their own.  Unless the paper is work related, and authorized, all work on the publication will have to be done on your own time, outside of work hours.  Therefore, schedule planning is very important and will also take two years. 

 

Additional time will need to be scheduled for getting Releasability reviews.

Put together a milestone calendar of when you expect to get certain tasks completed.  Because scheduling time can be so difficult, plan a little extra time in your schedule and try to keep the deadlines.  Always set your own deadlines well in advance of the actual deadlines.  Thus if the final paper submission deadline is the first of December, set your personal deadline a few weeks before that to give it a final editorial review and to give yourself some emergency leeway.

 

Public Release and ITAR Requirements

Whether in the private or public sector, employers have strict requirements for reviews and approvals before information is released to the public.  Some of these reviews can take months for each level of review.  Look at the advice of what to do in the area of Releasability, and plan appropriately.