When introducing Education Day sessions, I’ve often told a story I first heard in a Dale Carnegie class. Two desert travelers had made camp for the night when a stranger approached. They welcomed the man and shared their meal with him.

After the meal, the stranger got up to leave. “I thank you for your kindness,” he said. “I want you to know that I am a magician, and that tonight, if you will put sand in your pockets before you go to bed, in the morning you will be both happy and sad.”

Each man did put some sand in his pockets that night, and when they awoke the sand had turned to gold. And they were happy about that, but also sad – because they didn’t pack it in.

There’s gold of a different kind in those Expo seminars, and many attendees clearly know this, as they pack in as many as they can on Education Day and in the Thursday and Friday morning programs. But there’s a way to pack in even more value, and that’s to take full advantage of the CD recordings.

An Expo fixture

Of course, Convention CDs (formerly known as Convention Tapes) has been a fixture at the Expo for years. The good business done at their booth shows that many attendees realize the CDs have value. Think of it: If all you do is attend a seminar and listen to a presentation, it may be worth little more than the flash of gold in a pan.

The value comes in really learning the material, and that comes from listening again, and maybe yet again, and taking down notes, and putting the learnings into practice through company policies, practices and training. When you take information from a seminar and translate it to better ways of doing things out on the field, you have created gold.

And just think of the other ways those seminar recordings can help you. First off, while you can only be in one seminar room at a time, the CDs enable you to take in as many sessions as you want, on your own time, at your convenience. Suppose you were to look at the complete list of seminars on the Expo program and buy the CD for every one that seems to be of interest.

Now you can set aside time perhaps one day a week to listen to a seminar. Or slip one into your car or truck CD player and listen on the way to a job site or a meeting. If it turns out the subject matter isn’t helpful for whatever reason, you’ve lost nothing. But if it turns out to be valuable, look at what you’ve gained.

Spread the wealth

Second, though you can’t take all your employees to the Expo, you can bring the Expo back to them – with seminar CDs. Choose the ones that seem most valuable to your team. Buy them and make them available to everyone.

Or, better still, pick one morning per month, or per quarter, as Seminar Day, and play a CD before the start of work as part of your training program. It’s hard to imagine more cost-effective training than that.

Best of all, the CDs, many of them anyway, have long shelf lives. The mere fact a CD is from 2009 or earlier doesn’t mean it has lost its value. Much of the information in the Expo seminars is timeless. As new employees come on board, you can use the CDs to bring them up to speed on your company’s techniques and processes.

It’s not too late

So you’re already back from the 2011 Expo and didn’t buy any CDs? Or you bought a few but you’d like to have another look at the program and see what might fit? No problem. You can still order any or all of the 2011 seminars at the Convention CDs website, www.conventioncds.com.

Consider going back and giving a listen to the most useful seminars from the Expo just passed. It’s a way to make sure more of what you learned gets put into practice – that the knowledge you put into your head really does turn to gold.