It's the new year and you may be thinking of changing career.
If you’re thinking about a career in event management, you might be wondering the best way to get your foot in the door. You could try on-the-job training, but so many companies want either experience or qualifications. This is why so many people opt for studying event management.
An event management course will give you the skills and knowledge you need to kick start your career. It will also help to show employers that you are serious about your career. Or you could use the expert knowledge to venture out on your own and start your own events company.
Whatever your chosen career path, you’ll enjoy the best possible start with an event management qualification. Below are the skills you will learn during this type of course and how you can put them to use in a work environment.
What Do You Study In Event Management?
Event management courses will offer broad insight into the events industry. You will learn everything from how to stay on the right side of the law, to how to make sure your event is promoted far and wide. Most courses will place the greatest emphasis on practical skills, so you should be able to put these skills to use right away.
Site management skills
Site management skills will cover everything from scouting locations to securing permits for your chosen venue. Even if you are running an in-house event, you still need to know these essential site management skills. You will learn how to evaluate sites from a technical and practical perspective. You will also learn effective site layout design and planning. And finally, you will learn the fundamentals of site builds and take-down. From a legal perspective, you will learn about event permits, insurance requirements and how to make sure your event is safe.
Marketing and promotion
Events can only be successful if the right people know about them. With an event management course, you will learn vital skills that will enable you to promote and publicise your events in the most effective ways.
From creating event marketing strategies to branding and merchandising your events, there is so much ground to cover. Pitching to journalists is a highly specialised skill, but by learning the basics, you could soon be enjoying widespread press coverage for your events.
You will learn a range of marketing skills and discover how each one can benefit your events. You will learn how to write engaging copy about your events, which are the best channels to use to market your events, and how to keep the ball rolling well after the event has finished.
Finance for events
It is rare that you will ever get to plan an event where money isn’t a consideration. Working within prescribed budgets is an essential skill you will learn on an event management course. Making a budget is one thing, but being able to stick to it is another.
You might not have financial responsibility straight away, but having an understanding of this side of event management will allow you to stand out. At the early stages of your career, you might be given a small portion of a larger budget to work with and you will need to know how to manage this effectively.
If you don’t have a strong head for numbers, don’t worry. No one expects you to become an accountant overnight. A huge part of your training will involve learning how to get to grips with a budget, even if you aren’t very good at maths.
People management
Events cannot happen without people. A good event management course will teach you about all aspects of people management. You will learn how to approach different people and how to keep them on your side. As an event manager, you will need to know how to work with:
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Your colleagues
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Site managers
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Contractors
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Volunteers
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Stakeholders
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Attendees
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The public
Effective relationship management can make your role as an event manager a lot easier. This is why people management plays such an important role in your event management training. Alongside learning how to build strong relationships, you will also discover more about worker’s rights and how to stay on the right side of employment law. And finally, you will discover the best methods for recruiting and training your team.
Risk management
While we always hope that everything will go to plan, it’s also important to be aware of the risks. Risk management is all about identifying how and why things could go wrong and putting a plan in place to ensure this doesn’t disrupt the event. It will include things like identifying health hazards which could cause problems for attendees and workers.
You will also learn about the importance of things like fire safety and putting an evacuation plan in place. And finally, you will learn about your obligations as an event planner when it comes to security. You’ll learn how to arrange security teams so that you stay compliant with health and safety regulations.
This will often tie into your education surrounding site management. A key part of site management will be risk assessment, so you should expect to make important links between these two different sectors of event management.
Additional skills
While the skills you learn on your event management course will be valuable, it is often the contacts that you meet along the way that will really help to shape your career. You will be learning alongside a group of people with similar passions and this might make you feel like you are always in competition. However, it’s important to see these people as an asset to your career.
They might be the competition now, but they could be a valuable contact in a few years time when you have landed your first job. It’s important that you learn from your peers and make the most of the opportunities available to you.
If you have recently finished your event management course and want to learn more about job opportunities in Manchester and London, get in touch with Live Recruitment today.