 If things don't work to your satisfaction and it becomes time to move on, you are better prepared to initiate and manage personal change if you practice what it takes to stay up-to-date in your field as well as general business practice. Outside the organization and your daily work environment, there are more places and ways to ensure survival than there is time and money to leverage. Choosing from the available possibilities is the challenge that must continually be considered and addressed. Activ- ities such as conferences, seminars, standards development, and reading can keep you abreast of, and provide insight into, regulatory, technological, and general trends and directions. Depending on your bent for building, another useful activity is to design and make a model of something. Hardware, software, or otherwise, anything where understanding makes its way into the brain via eyeballs and fingers while giving the ears a rest can provide satisfaction, improve self-confidence, and enable clear thinking. Long-term survival is really a matter of being ready or being in a position to get ready quickly and move onto the next chapter in one's professional life. CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS If your background is mostly broadcasting, it is likely you know about and attend the International Broadcast Convention (IBC) (http://www.ibc.org/), the National Association of Broadcast- ers (NAB) (http://www.nab.org). or both. In addition you probably know of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), and the Institute of Electrical an Electronic Engineers (IEEE) (http:www.ieee.org). The Broadcast Technical Society technology-based conferences and training courses. For example, 14 PRACTICES, TOOLS, AND TECHNIQUES FOR LONG-TERM SURVIVAL SMPTE conducts a seminar in the fall, usually in November, and a second one in February each year. These conferences are technical in nature, and usually include subject matter indicative of trends and directions from emerging core technology to new products and oper- ational meth