Inspiration Hub

Before you can perform meeting magic, you first have to find your next gig. That requires a killer resume. When you have a lot to brag about, it can be easy to overlook important skills that you bring to an organization and emphasize irrelevant information. Let’s take your CV one section at a time to make sure your event cred is obvious even at a glance.

Event planners know that work and life are all about the little details. Small luxuries like a coffee bar with the type of milk you take or a swag bag that you won’t immediately throw away are what make an event great. Here are thirteen things in life that thrill event planners — to the bewilderment of most of your friends.

Distractions—a constant in the workplace, a thorn in a boss’ side, the enemy of the common employee. While a few workers may be able to power through for eight hours, with only a short lunch break and a phone in their bag all day, distractions are inevitable.

Attention to detail is one of the more important qualities of a great event manager. After all, perfectionism is a natural side effect of making a living providing people with flawless live experiences. Once your perfectionism starts creeping into your social life, though, you know you’ve really been in the biz for a while. Especially when you’re at a friend’s wedding and you find yourself paying more attention to the coordinator’s choices than the reception. (Oops.)

You love meeting new people, are calm under pressure, and are a whiz at prioritizing tasks. But is the event planning business right for you? Whether you’re a student looking for advice on how to break into the event planning business or an experienced professional wanting to change tracks, this roadmap can help guide your way. Discover the skills, tools, and tactics you need to know before becoming an event planner.

People in the events industry are witnesses to a wide range of human behavior. From sponsors with unreasonable demands to attendees who are more high-maintenance than your star performers, every day is a new experience. After all, working in events is a like a crash course in keeping calm and carrying on!

Have you ever noticed that when you’re working against a tough deadline, planning a big event, or tackling a challenging assignment, your brain sometimes shuts down out of sheer overwhelm? It’s not your imagination—it’s fear rearing its risk-averse head. Here’s what you need to know to turn off the fear and get back to work.

We need to rethink the idea of failure. It is time to stop viewing it as something negative. Successful failure is when we use it as fuel to improve ourselves, our businesses and our events. Failure helps us take that (at times) much needed step back to rethink, regroup and refocus. After which, we start up again and discipline ourselves to take one step at a time moving forward from the experience.

We’ve all had that one disastrous event where hardly anyone turned up. It’s an excruciating experience, especially if you have stakeholders to answer to. But there’s no reason you should give up.

You’ve looked at your schedule, and see that you’re slammed. Then, you receive an email from a client requesting a change to an event proposal. Also, an attendee is wondering if they can call with questions about the program you’re putting on. Soon, your me-time has dissipated and you’re attempting to make the impossible happen.

Every successful leader knows ongoing professional and personal development is the pathway to continued success. Which is why people pay big bucks to attend leadership workshops. While it’s important that your workshop provides leaders with a new perspective on an old problem, there’s also fun to be had. Let these five leadership workshop activity ideas inspire you to strike the balance between strategy and play.

The cost of education—from college all the way to professional development throughout one’s career—can be significant. Knowing this, groups throughout the meeting and event industry have banded together for years to help ensure knowledge and advancement is a reality. The result is that there is now an incredible supply of scholarships to be had, thanks to generous donations from your planner peers, industry suppliers and professional associations.

Having a chronic illness while pursuing a career can be difficult to navigate. Every chronic illness manifests itself differently, and learning how to balance health with a full-time job takes time, effort, and trial and error. While it may feel impossible at first, juggling the two can be achieved.

It’s a harsh reality: No matter how skilled in event management you are, you won’t get your dream job if your resume doesn’t stand out. But when so much of your event planning work has to be experienced to be understood, how can you prove your prowess in writing? The key is to make the typical elements of an effective resume work to reflect your skills. Here’s a checklist of the essential elements that should be on your event manager resume so you can stand out from other applicants.

You’re a week from the event. The caterer wants to change the menu. Sponsors are requesting data that will take hours to pull. And your boss wants you to pitch the theme for your next event — today. You need to learn the art of saying no — whether to chaotic vendors, over-eager attendees, or your own staff. Giving in to every request can end up with you stretched too thin, making careless errors, or burning yourself out.

You do it all. As the owner of your own third-party planner business you are the captain of the ship—and the crew. To help you navigate the sometimes rough waters of running your own business, we put together this handy resource guide with tips for everything from marketing and taxes to technology and negotiating. Feel free to bookmark this page as we will continue to update it with new tools for managing and growing your company. Until then, we wish you fair winds, following seas and full agendas.

For many professionals, work/life balance is elusive. And even while off the job, people view leisure activities as a means to improving work performance — like practicing mindfulness or learning new productivity methods — instead of a way to genuinely relax and disengage. In fact, highlighting the professional benefits of leisure activities has become one of the only ways to trick people into taking up a hobby, according to Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time.

I define leadership as a person or organization that is always looking for ways to innovate, that is not afraid to push important and sometimes controversial issues ahead, that digs in to solve or build without waiting for others to do so, that doesn’t look for individual kudos, but rather for collective progress.

Fear has been described by the acronym FEAR: False Expectations Appearing Real. We know that change is often accompanied by fear, as well as a sense of risk, uncertainty, and excitement. It’s also true that if we change the way we see things, the things we see change. 

Along with the numbers that we crunch for the annual Convene Salary Survey, we ask a handful of open-ended questions. Including this one: What do you like least about your job? Although readers singled out problems including attrition and room blocks, cuts to hotel commissions, managing shrinking budgets, and dealing with inefficient work processes (“So. Many. Emails.,” was one response) the overwhelming majority of the answers to the question weren’t focused on logistical challenges. 

“Should I get a master’s degree or a certification?” It’s a question I’ve been asked a lot over the years. And my answer is usually an ironic, “Yes.” Asking, “Should I get a master’s degree or a certification?” is like asking, “Should I have an apple or should I have turkey and dressing with giblet gravy?”

Event planners are a special breed of hard-working, hyper-organized adrenaline junkies. Consistently named as one of the world’s most stressful jobs, the role of event organizer is uniquely challenging — yet equally rewarding for some. Think you were born to be an event planner? Check out these must-have event planning skills to see if you’ve got what it takes.

Feedback is a positive thing. It helps us identify ways we can improve our personal and professional lives, and yet we dread the idea of receiving any form of criticism. Why? According to a New York Timespiece, “Why It’s So Hard to Hear Negative Feedback,” it’s all about how we think — and feel — about it.