Professional Membership

I am a member of a few professional organisations, and lately is having trouble to pay for all of them. Fortunately my employer sponsors or allow me to claim for my membership fee, but quite unfortunately, it covers only the fee for one membership. Obviously I try to maximise this by claiming on the most expensive, which is the INCOSE membership fee, but I am having doubts of whether the fee is worth the price.

For example most organisations nowadays only do event online and although the softwares require subscription, I imagine they don’t cost as much as the fee for a venue. Although it can be argued that most of this organisation has their own venue so they don’t need to pay for them anyway. Still, refreshments and arrangements, for example employing people to handle the events would require more money than doing the events and webinar online, I think.

I do remember though in my previous organisation where we collected fees to organise department events, and the collected fees seemed a lot, almost twice my monthly salary at that time. However when planning for an event, the small costs such as bookings, drinks/refreshments, quickly adds up and in the end, the collected fees were not enough. Relating back to the professional membership fee that I am paying, I am not sure how much is the total collected sum, but it can possibly be this value is practically nil when all the small costs are taken care of.

What does small costs are, I’m not sure. Hopefully they’re put to good use.

Thanks for reading.