Together 2026 Speaker Article: Part 5 with Ana Sofia Correia
Next up in our Speaker Article series is Ana Sofia Correia, sharing her ELIA Together 2026 event highlights and key moments, from her co-presented session, and workshop.
Changing the narrative: Value, Collaboration, and Professional Maturity
Speaking twice at ELIA Together 2026 gave me the chance to reflect on two topics that might seem separate at first, but are closely connected in practice: collaboration between freelancers, and the way we communicate our value to clients. What linked them for me was the idea of professional maturity–and the infrastructure that supports it.
In the session I co-presented with Ana Catarina Lopes, Mariana Teixeira, and Patrícia Paes de Sousa, Stronger Together: How Freelancers Work, Grow, and Thrive in Partnership, we talked about something many freelancers experience but do not always name clearly: the difference between working independently and working in isolation. The session focused on what becomes possible when collaboration is treated as part of a professional way of working, rather than as something occasional or informal. That includes working together on projects, brainstorming decisions, referring work, discussing pricing, improving workflows, and creating more continuity in freelance life. It also means recognising that different strengths make collaboration more useful. In our case, those strengths include clinical and regulatory work, scientific and technical content, marketing and brand tone, and my own focus on patient-facing materials and medcomms. That kind of complementarity makes work more efficient and robust.
My workshop, From Service Provider to Trusted Partner: How to Communicate your Value, approached professional maturity from another angle. There, the focus was on how language professionals position themselves and describe what they do. Too often, value is still communicated in production terms: word counts, turnaround times, tools, output. But clients are not only managing text. They are managing risk, usability, stakeholder expectations, and the consequences of poor decisions. In the workshop, we explored three pillars of positioning: expertise, responsibility, and decision support. For me, that is where a more mature professional conversation begins. Not with tasks, but with contribution. Not with what was delivered, but with what was clarified, anticipated, prevented, or improved.
Both sessions pointed, in different ways, to the need for better professional infrastructure. Not only systems and tools, but also relationships, habits, language, and shared ways of thinking that make our work more sustainable and more visible in the right way. Whether we are building stronger peer networks or communicating more clearly with clients, the shift is similar: from ad hoc, reactive ways of working to something more intentional, more grounded, and better able to support long-term growth.
That was probably my main takeaway from the event. Professional growth is not only about improving skills. It is also about building the structures around our work that allow those skills to be used well.
On a more personal note, it was also a pleasure to experience Together in Portugal, my home country. As always, some of the best moments happened in between sessions: the conversations during the networking breaks, the chance to reconnect with colleagues I had not seen in a while, and the opportunity to get to know new people in the community. That mix of reflection, exchange, and human connection is one of the things I value most about events like this, and ELIA Together was no exception.
Don’t hesitate to reach out to Ana Sofia to continue the conversation, share your thoughts on this topic here on LinkedIn, and follow this series to see all Speaker Articles.
Don’t hesitate to reach out to Ana Sofia to continue the conversation, share your thoughts on this topic here on LinkedIn, and follow this series to see all Speaker Articles.
