This article is based on a post originally sourced from devops.com, updated for clarity and depth for a DevOps engineering audience.
DevOps World | Jenkins World is widely regarded as one of the premier annual conferences for DevOps practitioners and Jenkins users. Every year it brings together thousands of engineers, architects, and leaders for sessions, hands-on training, keynotes, and networking. But knowing you want to attend is only half the battle—you still need to get your manager on board with the budget and travel approval.
Below are six concrete arguments you can bring to that conversation, framed around the measurable value the conference delivers—to you and to your organization.
1. You Can Pursue Recognized DevOps Leadership Certification
DevOps is as much a cultural discipline as it is a technical one, and organizations consistently struggle to find people who can champion that culture internally. The conference offers structured courses—including a DevOps Leader track—designed to equip attendees with the skills needed to sit the DevOps Leader certification exam.
Beyond that single certification path, training sessions at the event have historically covered DevSecOps practices, Continuous Delivery with Jenkins X, and operational best practices for CloudBees Core. Attending puts you on a credentialed path that benefits you professionally and gives your team a recognized internal subject-matter expert.
Talking point for your manager: A certified DevOps leader on the team reduces reliance on external consultants and accelerates adoption of mature DevOps practices across projects.
2. You’ll Return with Sharper Automation and CI/CD Skills
If your organization uses Jenkins, practical expertise in pipeline design, administration, and troubleshooting directly affects delivery speed and reliability. The conference runs introductory through intermediate sessions on Jenkins administration and Jenkins Pipeline that are explicitly structured to build on one another—so learners leave with a coherent, progressive skill set rather than isolated tips.
The training curriculum has also been aligned with the Certified Jenkins Engineer (CJE) exam, meaning attendance can be a direct step toward a formal credential. Additional sessions typically cover automated release orchestration and widely adopted DevOps toolchains, giving you cross-tool perspective you can apply immediately.
Talking point for your manager: Skills acquired at the conference can be applied on day one back at the office—reducing pipeline failures, improving build reliability, and shortening onboarding time for new team members.
3. You’ll Learn Directly from Industry Leaders and Jenkins Core Contributors
Reading documentation or watching recorded talks is useful, but it is a fundamentally different experience from hearing an expert speak live and being able to ask a question afterward. DevOps World | Jenkins World has featured keynotes and sessions from notable figures including Jenkins creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi, CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey, and analysts such as James Governor of RedMonk.
The access to primary voices in the ecosystem—people who are actively shaping the direction of Jenkins and the broader DevOps toolchain—is difficult to replicate through any other channel. Insights from those conversations often provide early signals on where the ecosystem is heading, giving your team a strategic advantage in tooling decisions.
Talking point for your manager: First-hand access to ecosystem leaders surfaces roadmap signals and emerging best practices that inform better architectural decisions at your organization.
4. You’ll Gain a Broader Perspective on DevOps in Practice
With more than 100 sessions available across a typical conference program, attendees can move well beyond their existing focus area. Topics have ranged from DevOps culture theory versus practice, to DevOps adoption in the public sector, to machine learning in continuous delivery environments. Case studies from organizations in different industries—automotive, telecommunications, financial services—provide concrete examples of how real teams have solved problems similar to yours.
This breadth of perspective is hard to find in any single book, course, or internal training session. Exposure to how other industries and organizations approach the same challenges frequently surfaces ideas that are directly transferable to your context.
Talking point for your manager: You can return and run an internal knowledge-sharing session, turning conference attendance into a multiplier for the whole team rather than a benefit to a single individual.
5. You’ll Build a Professional Network That Benefits Your Organization
Concentrating thousands of DevOps practitioners in one venue creates networking density you cannot replicate online. Attendees share war stories, debate tooling choices, and swap contact information. That network has practical organizational value: the next time your team hits a difficult problem—a tricky Jenkins configuration, an edge case in a pipeline framework, a staffing gap—you may have a direct line to someone who has already solved it.
Professional relationships built at conferences also tend to be stickier than LinkedIn connections because they are rooted in shared, in-person experience. Those contacts become long-term resources: people who will respond to a direct message, share internal documentation, or point you toward a solution faster than a support ticket will.
Talking point for your manager: A strong peer network reduces time-to-resolution on complex technical problems and can surface candidate referrals when you are hiring for specialized roles.
6. You Can Structure Your Attendance to Generate Direct ROI
The most persuasive argument for any conference investment is a plan that ties specific sessions and goals to specific organizational pain points. Before you approach your manager, do the work: identify the top two or three challenges your team is facing—whether that is slow release cycles, pipeline reliability, security integration in CI/CD, or something else—and map those to sessions on the conference schedule.
Come to the conversation with a brief written plan: here are our current pain points, here are the sessions and training tracks I intend to attend, here is how I plan to share what I learn when I return. That framing transforms the trip from a personal benefit into an organizational investment, which is a much easier approval to get.
Talking point for your manager: A clearly scoped attendance plan with defined learning objectives and a post-conference knowledge transfer session demonstrates accountability and turns conference spend into a team-level asset.
Putting It All Together
No single argument on this list is likely to secure approval on its own—but together they build a coherent case that addresses the concerns most managers raise: cost, time away, and uncertain return on investment. Lead with the certification and skills story, reinforce it with the knowledge-transfer plan, and close with the networking value. That combination covers technical, operational, and strategic angles, and gives your manager concrete justification to approve the trip.