Persuade Your Boss

Are you interested in attending the 2020 AACC Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo, but uncertain how to persuade your employer to fund the trip? Follow these five simple steps to prepare a request for your boss.

Step 1: Identify Your At-Work Challenges

Pinpoint the biggest challenges your lab or organization faces, especially the ones that relate directly to your position.

Step 2: Draw Up a Sample Conference Agenda

With those challenges in mind, search through the AACC Annual Scientific Meeting’s 200+ educational sessions to identify the ones that address the issues you’re facing.

Also be sure to look through the AACC Clinical Lab Expo’s exhibiting companies and identify the vendors that offer the diagnostic solutions your lab needs. 

Step 3: Create a Proposal for Your Boss

Use your research in Step 2 to create a succinct proposal for your boss that explains why sending you to the AACC Annual Scientific Meeting will benefit your organization and the patients you serve. Include your top challenges, and outline how the sessions and exhibitors you’ve identified will equip you to handle them.

Additional reasons to justify your attendance include:

• Professional development opportunities such as the AACC Annual Scientific Meeting are essential for keeping up with the latest trends, research, and best practices in the rapidly evolving field of clinical laboratory medicine. In turn, staying current ensures that you and your lab continue to deliver state-of-the-art patient care.


• By learning about the real-world success stories of others in the profession, your lab will be able to avoid using a trial-and-error approach to tackling issues and will save time and money in the long run.


• The AACC Clinical Lab Expo brings the world’s major in vitro diagnostic companies together under one roof, enabling you to explore and compare all the clinical lab products and services on your lab’s wishlist efficiently and in person.

Step 4: Send a Formal Request to Your Boss

In case your boss needs or prefers your request in writing, we’ve drafted an approval request template letter. Feel free to use and edit this letter as needed and send it to your supervisor:

Download the Letter

Step 5: Put What You Learn Into Action

When you return from the AACC Annual Scientific Meeting, hold a post-conference briefing with relevant lab staff to share what you learned—from best practices to the low-down on new diagnostic instruments—and develop a strategy for putting this knowledge into action.

You’ll positively impact your lab and the patients it serves, which will pave the way to convince your boss to send you back to the AACC Annual Scientific Meeting in 2021.