This is the story of how, attending meetups and being involved in the Manchester Tech community helped the speakers gain confidence. We explore what motivated them to join a meetup, and see how they went from shy meetup attendees to Umbraco MVPs (most valued person).

We see how encouraging employees to attend, and if they wish talk at meetups. This allows them to:
- Learn new skills
- Validate existing approaches to development
- Gain confidence

We show how this benefits the wider development team, the companies attendees work for and the tech community.

We will also share our stories of how attending meetups helped encouraged us to give back to the development community. We will show what happens at our meetups, how we encourage new speakers.

In addition, we will discuss ways we have been helping encourage more younger people to enter the field of STEM.