To do your job well and grow your career, you have to meet people doing things differently. You have to meet people who have faced what you are now going through. In short: you have to get out there.

And what better way to get out there, connect with peers from across the country and improve your skills as an authorizer than by attending the 2016 NACSA Leadership Conference—the only conference dedicated to you and your development.

Given resources are increasingly scarce, explaining what makes the NACSA conference worthwhile to your supervisor is as important as ever. Here are our favorite boss-friendly reasons to join us in October:

• Once-a-year networking that you can’t pass up. From our welcome reception to the 30 minute breaks between each session, you’ll have ample opportunity to connect with more than 500 leaders in the authorizing field. It’s amazing what you can learn in as little as a five minutes by picking the brains of others who have dealt with similar challenges your office is facing, or from those who have been authorizing for 15 years.

• Return to the office with new ideas and actionable plans to implement them. Each session is designed so that you walk away with new strategies, frameworks and ideas to tackle the issues that matter most to you, such as managing difficult schools in your portfolio, authorizing as a shop of one, or orienting new board members to quality. Plus, let your boss know you’re taking advantage of our Thursday workshop to carve out time to put together an implementation plan before you head home.

• It’s not just an authorizing conference. Effective authorizers must build coalitions, create buy-in from key stakeholders, and manage changes in leadership at the top. This is why we call it a Leadership conference, not an authorizing conference. Leadership development is built into many of our sessions, from a session about implementing missions to a final Thursday workshop focused on using mindfulness as a framework for leadership hosted by the Institute for Mindful Leadership.

Need even more reasons to share with your boss? Fear not, our full schedule of sessions will be available next week.

We hope to see you at the 2016 NACSA Leadership Conference in October!