Taking meetings to the next level...

Before you start a course in a college or university, you need to know whether or not your students will find work. Especially with a new profession like Meeting Architecture… This question was debated at length in the Kopenhagen - Ball Harbour conclaves a few months ago.

Today thousands of organisations, associations and corporations are hiring meeting planners with no 'Meeting Architecture' / content background whatsoever. The students they hire have tourism and a logistics background and are trained on the job for the content side of the conference. One only can hope th, when they start to master the content side as well, they will be around still.

In larger organisations, these kids never get close to the content side of meetings and totally focus on the logistics of the hospitality. More and more they get hired by the hospitality industry (and agencies?) rather than organisations that plan meetings. Somebody has to do that job, it will always be critical to the success of any meeting, but organizations regard that as a commodity, easy to outsource.

Some employers like Isabel Bardinet who organises a 30.000 participant association conference (EUROPEAN SOCIETY OF CARDIOLOGY) says she never hires someone from event management because the content side is too important and these professionals don’t have the required background.
The content side of her conferences is so crucial she wants to keep that in house so she can  innovate and steer it in a close and consistent team.
She uses freelance for hospitality and logistics but for full time staff, she hires people with a  marketing, communication, sociology or psychology background. She mixes her team with these specialist into a multi disciplinary team.
She sees multidisciplinary meeting Architects as the potential answer to her prayers.

If that is the choice today: No background or a mono-disciplinary background, I believe that those that will hire in the future, will gladly choose for the multidisciplinary Meeting Architects rather than the other two categories...

The meeting architect will know all relevant things in Education, but he will not be a pure education specialist. He will know the relevant things around networking technology without being a geek. He will have sufficient sociology background without being a serious sociologist.
ince organisations find the content side of highest strategic order, they will want to hire the talent to manage the content in full time jobs and outsource the hospitality logistics. In this way a fight to hire may arise between the agencies that used to deliver the multidisciplinary freelance teams and the organisations that prefer to keep that close to their core activities. With Meeting Architects, this will become an option, even for smaller organisations.

A few times I’ve asked meeting management students at the IMEX Future leaders forum if they would like to be a meeting architect. They only got a one hour quick and complicated presentation from me: 10% said yes I want to be a meeting architect, 80% said I want to mix meeting planning (hospitality logistics) and Meeting Architecture. If that is right, we can start slow and safe, and the market will quickly decide where this go’s.
Deep down, in the midst of this crisis, we all agree that the industry needs to add “Content, content, content!” to the old “Location, location, location!” (56.000 vs 2.400.000 hits on Google). The only thing we need to do now is to add the Student in that mix: a formula that cannot fail.

Maarten Vanneste, CMM
August 21, 2009, San-Diego.