The events industry is hyper-competitive but super-rewarding.
Every sector now has an events arm of some kind, offering a diverse range of opportunity to passionate professionals looking to broaden their experience and challenge their abilities. Building a successful career in events management demands long-term thinking on a daily basis. One way to improve this approach is to refine your planning into five key threads of thought – so you can assess and re-assess your progress and adjust your targets when your ambitions shift skyward.
Attend
Whether you’re just starting out or an old hand, the best way to understand what makes a good event great is to attend as many as possible. Regardless of it being a public or private event, run by a charity, a council or a big business, there will be events professionals in the wings, working hard to deliver a positive experience.
Study their planning and execution first-hand; from arrival to departure, everything you engage with will (all being well) be a planned experience. Learning from other professionals is fundamental to equipping yourself for improvement. Talk to events planners and venue managers – London is home to some of the world’s finest corporate venues, and building up an understanding of how these different sized settings operate is an important facet of intelligent events management.
Communicate Events management relies heavily on clarity and confidence of communication. At the planning stage, innovate and do away with conventional digital comms – simple project management platforms like Basecamp offer a clear and communal space for teams to collaborate and develop events. When you’re in the thick of it, don’t be afraid to use tried-and-tested methods to get results. Walkie talkies may seem clumsy and old fashioned, but in terms of up-to-the-minute, flexible communication without a mobile device, they are fantastic – particularly if you’re working across a big venue, both indoor and outdoor.
Strategise As Simon Sinek’s much lauded book posits, every plan for an effective and popular product should ‘start with why’. Planning the how and what of your event is important, but if you don’t know why you’re creating what you’re creating, then neither will your target audience, and the project will fail. Align your plans with the key targets for your business or organisation from day one. If you can prove yourself a capable strategist who can deliver results for your business, you will be trusted to develop more ambitious ideas in the future.
Build great teams To carry out any effective event on a significant scale, you need the support and commitment of a dedicated team of professionals you can trust. If you’re part of an events team, be a team player but be ambitious – seize new opportunities but be sure to support colleagues when it’s their turn to lead a project. This will only help you progress faster, learn more and make your own events sharper and slicker occasions.
Never stop Growing as a professional demands a commitment to learning throughout your career. Each job you take, each step of the ladder that you climb – if you are not gaining positively from each experience, look forward and find something else. Once you have that foothold in the industry, being discerning and self-motivated about the opportunities available is vital to making positive progress. It’s all about finding the work that equips and enables you to move forward to the next big challenge.
Ofer Yatziv currently works as a Sales and Marketing manager at BetterVenues.org.uk and has over 15 years of experience in the industry. He has worked across a variety of roles as a producer of live events and weddings, as well as coordinating national and international theatre tours.
