The Secret to Crafting a Successful Autodesk University Proposal

[The CAD Geek]

Each year, AU (formerly known as Autodesk University) offers a chance to learn from some of the top experts in the industry today through hundreds of classes on practically any topic you can imagine. As an expert yourself, you may have wondered how you can become one of the experts who take the stage at this year’s conference? 

As an AU Speaker Mentor and a speaker myself for the last 17 years, I have learned that the question has a simple yet complicated answer, and that’s what I’ll share in this post. 

Call For Proposals 

Let’s get the simple part of how to become an AU speaker out of the way first. The journey to speaking at AU starts with a class proposal you author and submit to Autodesk during their annual call for proposal period. 

Though the exact dates vary from year to year, the annual Call for Proposals typically opens shortly after the annual product release in the spring and remains open for about a month. At the time of writing, the Call for Proposal period for AU 2024 opened on April 2nd and will remain open until April 30^th. 

Put simply, the annual Call for Proposal period is your one and only chance to submit a proposal to speak at AU. 

Preparing your Proposal 

While the simple answer to becoming an AU speaker is to submit a proposal, that raises an even greater question of what should your proposal include? 

The process to submit a proposal is entirely web-based. While the Call for Proposal period is open, you’ll find a button on the AU website to start the proposal process. 

To propose a class for AU 2024, your proposal must include the following information. 

• Session Title (125 Characters of Less) 
• Session Description (up to 1,000 characters) 
• Session Format 
  • Industry Talk 
  • Case Study 
  • Technical Instruction 
  • Product Demo 
  • Panel 
  • Theater Talk 
  • Hands-on Lab 
• Top Relevant Topics: Choose up to 3 from a predefined list. 
• Keywords: Add up to 3 from a predefined list. 
• American Institute of Architects (AIA) continuing education eligibility 
  • AIA Standard Learning Units 
  • AIA Health, Safety, and Wellness (HSW) Units 
• Speaker Experience 
  • Experience presenting at Autodesk University and other conferences. 
• Industry Segment Target Audience 
• Relevant Autodesk products (Limit 5) 
• Primary Audience Role 
  • Business Leaders 
  • Managers 
  • Product Users 
  • Software Developers 
• Primary Occupations of Target Audience (Limit 5) 
• Primary Focus of Content 
  • An industry or project case study 
  • Exploring industry practice and workflows. 
  • Getting started with new software 
  • Going beyond software basics 
  • Thought leadership and innovation 
• Level of Proficiency 
  • Associate (Entry-level professionals) 
  • Expert (Senior professionals with multiple years of experience) 
  • Professional (Mid-career to more seasoned professionals) 
  • Non Applicable (Content is not skills based) 
• Describe any prerequisite skills or knowledge, including a brief description of who will benefit from attending your session (consider industries, disciplines, job titles, specialties, interests, goals, memberships, etc.). 

What to Include in a Successful Proposal 

Submitting an AU class proposal is easy. The challenge rests in crafting a proposal that stands out from the many thousands of proposals fellow experts like you also submit. 

‘Fellow experts’ is the key phrase you must consider when crafting your proposal. As an AU speaker, you’re surrounded by experts. The expertise that makes you a unicorn at your office, is the ‘minimum installation requirements’ for becoming an AU speaker. 

So, what makes a successful AU class proposal? 

In my experience, the contrast separating accepted class proposals from rejected ones isn’t expertise –it’s problem-solving. Specifically, the proposals Autodesk accepts tend to solve two problems (fulfill two needs). 

Successful Proposals Fulfill an Autodesk Need 

Each year, Autodesk establishes a theme for AU. While many things support and bring life to that theme, one of the most substantial elements is the classes the conference offers. The classes that start life as proposals from experts like you. 

As an aspiring AU speaker, the good news is that you don’t have to guess about the types of sessions Autodesk is looking for. Each year, Autodesk publishes a Call for Proposals guide that outlines the industry topics and themes that Autodesk will place centerstage at this year’s conference. 

For example, the introduction of the AU 2024 Call for Proposal Guide reads as follows: 

We live and work in a time of radical transformation. Professional practices in the Design and Make industries are changing rapidly. AI is no longer a future possibility—it’s a present-day reality, changing how we work on a monthly, if not weekly basis. Over the past four years, many companies discovered new levels of resilience and agility through innovation—and have seen their technology investments pay off with unexpected growth. But they face continued challenges—from labor shortages and material constraints to cost increases—that continue to drive the search for better, more connected, and more sustainable ways to design and make.  

AU is the conference that brings together practitioners, innovators, and thought leaders from the fields of architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and media and entertainment to share how they’re adapting to challenges and seizing new opportunities—creating better projects in ways that are better for people, the planet, and the bottom line. 

The bottom line is that proposals matching and embodying this vision have a much higher chance of being accepted than those that don’t. 

Successful Proposals Fulfill a Conference Attendee Need 

Despite the rich depth of information inside Autodesk’s Call for Proposals Guide, there is no similar guide that tells you what conference attendees want and need. So how do you write a successful proposal for an imaginary audience you won’t meet until you’re standing in front of them at AU? 

Although the challenges have increased, I’ve found that the core need of most attendees is virtually unchanged since I presented my first class at Autodesk University 2007. 

Much like the Call for Proposals Guide itself, the best AU classes curate information in a way that makes impossibly complex technical concepts and workflows both approachable and doable by attendees. Let me say that again, they enable your attendees to take action on a topic that, before your session, was impossibly complex to them. 

The value successful AU speakers deliver isn’t their expertise, it’s their ability to curate. 

Curating Complexity 

We live in an age of information parity. Practically anything you might want to know, including the topics of your AU class proposal, is little more than a Google search (or ChatGPT prompt) away. 

From Autodesk’s product documentation and online forums to YouTube videos and blog posts like this one, ‘your expertise’ is omnipresent – especially at AU. The problem AU attendees face isn’t a deficit of information; it’s making sense of the surplus of information they must navigate every hour of every day to do their jobs. 

It’s for this reason that I’ve found that the best and most successful AU sessions present less, not more, information. 

As you start writing your class proposal, ask yourself, what’s the 1% of your topic that makes the other 99% understandable?  

Your answer. The 1% of what could be known about your topic is the extent of what your AU class should be. 

Find the 1% of Your Topic 

Arguably, the most difficult part of writing a class proposal that’s accepted and later made into a class is finding the most important 1% of your topic. 

While I’ve not found an easy button for this, there is a series of questions I like to ask myself to help me discover it. 

• Question 1: What job title(s) does your audience have? 
• Question 2: Who is your target audience? 
• Question 3: What existing knowledge does your audience have? 
• Question 4: Where do people typically stumble with this topic? 
• Question 5: What are the biggest pain points people often have with this topic? 
• Question 6: What is the first thing a person needs to know about this topic/content? 
• Question 7: What is the most important thing you want to leave learners with once they attend your class? 
• Question 8: If you had to distill your content into just 3-4 main points, what’s the first point you would make? 
• Question 9: What are the other ones? 
• Question 10: Is there a system or process you use to explain this content? 
• Question 11: What often surprises people about this topic/content? 
• Question 12: At this stage of learning, what doesn’t a learner need to know about this topic/content? 
• Question 13: What existing resources do you know of on this topic, either created by you or others? 
• Question 14: What verbs most align with the content you think you might present? 

You can likely see the correlation of the above questions and the information your AU proposal must contain. This is no accident. The above questions are a way to help you express your amazing idea more clearly and convincingly to the reviewers of your proposal. In short, the clearer your proposal is to reviewers, the higher your chances of getting it approved. 

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