It’s no secret that the Business Events sector of the Meetings & Events industry is not exactly known for being visionary creative leaders. In fact, despite how hard we try, we are consistently outshined by our next-door neighbors: the trend-setting brand-marketing, experiential-focused, B2C, and, dare I say it, luxury weddings and social sector planners.
I am left scratching my head asking, “Why? Why are we accepting defeat?”
And now more than ever, “What are we doing about it?”
I have dedicated over 20 years to the Business Events sector. If we were in sports, this would be my home team. I would bleed our colors. I care deeply about our opportunity and responsibility to impact people, brands, and businesses in our B2B world.
How we compare to other teams in our division, especially in the categories of innovation, design, and creativity matters. It matters so much that I started by researching what I refer to as The Great Divide. This divide exists between the major-league market demands and the minor-league bench of talent today.
I went down the rabbit hole and found some alarming gaps. Bluntly, we are in a strategic skills crisis.
I chose the word “crisis” because it accurately portrays the severity of what’s occurring and indicates a turning point in which key decisions need to be made to survive. This is where we are.
If we want to solve a crisis, it takes a holistic approach. This is a needed conversation about the evolution and survival of our sector.
What’s the issue?
In my research, I focused on the strategist, creative, and designer roles and where they access adequate learning and development. I examined the entire career lifecycle, from C-suite executives to incoming graduates in Event Management and Hospitality programs. This meant looking deeply at the curriculums offered as well as the post-graduation certificates, programs, and industry events. Here’s some findings:
- 90% of top 10 University programs do not require strategic, critical thinking, human skills, or leadership courses
- Over 70% of employees in specialized roles marked Critical Thinking, Collaboration, and Leadership skills as highly critical to their roles (According to PWC)
- Over 60% of leaders said that Identifying/Developing New Talent, Strategic Thinking, and Change Management were key skills to develop, yet less than 30% of these leaders have received training on these topics (According to Development Dimensions International)
- Curiosity and Lifelong learning were identified as top core skills, above 40% require it, to have but the average actual of the workforce is less than 10% (According to World Economic Forum)
These finding lead me to some intriguing questions:
- How will we attract the best thinkers if we aren’t set up for them to thrive?
- Why would they want to come if they aren’t properly fed, nurtured, or even welcomed?
- How are we teaching, inspiring, and nurturing their brains to be ready for what comes next?
I started my career in a different time. I am thankful to have had mentors and experts that pour their knowledge into me. I followed curiosity and my pursuits. I became an expert in my own right. For those beginning their careers today in a remote-based world, where the requests are more complex and strategic than ever, how could they feel prepared or supported?
How can we prepare them for the future already knocking on our doorstep?
Today, I can safely say we are set up to fail.
Not only do we not have the right mix of diverse skills represented in our workforce today, but our talent pool is also made up of over 65% sophomores who lack the experience to deliver upon the PhD-level complexity of challenges on compressed timelines, on demand, again and again.
We’ve thrown them into the deep end and expect them to be Olympic swimmers. That is what our market is demanding today. Forget the intense learning curve and constantly changing landscape while bringing award-winning experiences to life.
Working in events – working with brilliant strategic and creative minds is a privilege. It is a privilege to create shared realities, to connect people, to educate, embolden, empower, motivate, and inspire communities.
I am hyper-focused on the extreme lack of adequate learning and development needed to reach our full potential. Beyond that, meeting the expectations of guests and stakeholders.
Who am I to talk about this?
My experiences as an entrepreneur and an executive provide me with a unique lens to view the issue on a micro- and macro-level.
I ran a creative-cored business, a DMC, a hybrid brand marketing, and a meeting planning agency. In this type of micro-environment, the learning was primarily peer-to-peer because we were all in person in an office every day. We had standard operating procedures, a handbook, etc. What produced strong talent was when the team sat together, newer members shadowing more experienced peers and leaders.
Fast-forward to my time as an executive, post-covid at an enterprise organization. The existing company-wide onboarding and training wasn’t what it could be. We, like everyone at that time, were faced with hiring rapidly in a compressed timeframe. This required us to create a training program to scale across many offices operating decentrally. Creating this training was one of the biggest learning opportunities and challenges of my career. I don’t think that virtual learning by itself, all from within the same organization is sufficient. Especially in this age of remote work where you don’t have the opportunity to shadow your peer or leader.
Why does this Great Divide matter? Is it really a crisis?
This age of newbies is set up for an extreme learning curve, particularly in the areas of critical thinking, strategy, creativity, and human skills. Yet, if you look at the data – even with AI, these skills are the highest rated as critical for today’s jobs so where are they going to learn?
For veterans of the industry, where do we go to work on our change management, growth mindset, and strategic and transformational leadership skills? We have to go outside the industry and bend ourselves into a pretzel to apply these skills to our daily jobs. Everyone could attend 4-6 annual conferences and spend upwards of $30K and still, their needs wouldn’t be met properly.
Additionally, many of us have to pay to have access to these skills. Even the biggest and best organizations in our sector of the industry aren’t investing in training in these skills even at their director level.
It’s alarming because once again, then where is this new generation learning from?
There are over 7,500 creative professionals in the business events sector we are not supporting.
I have attended industry conferences for years and I always leave feeling under fed, uninspired. After decades of this, I get more and more frustrated. I’ve even considered leaving the industry that feels like it has failed me.
I cannot even imagine how these fresh faces feel. They go and learn tactical concepts. They learn about trends, flashy current events, or hacks. Yet, no one is teaching them how to think to get to that outcome. No one is showing how to build a strategy that will get them to the finish line.
We don’t fall in love with the process that led that team or designer or strategist to that result, we just see something shiny.
Something has got to change. We need to solve this crisis.
For our industry to take the steps to become creative leaders, we must first begin to bridge the gap in our thinking.
Strategy. Design. Creative.
These are all essential skills to meet the experiential and personalized demands of today. These all require adaptability, collaboration, problem-solving, innovation, ideation, risk-taking, and a myriad of other basic human skills that are absent today.
For too many years, I stayed in my lane as a strategic creative leader and consultant. At this stage, I don’t see anyone doing anything about this to the right volume and variety.
We have a responsibility to our industry, and to our people, to activate their minds, connect them with their peers, and feed their brains so that they can innovate. We need to attract diverse minds so that in turn, the Business Events sector steps into its potential as a Creative leader.
It’s time to begin bridging this divide.