Is an events management degree providing students with the right skills for a graduate events position?

Evaluation on Contemporary workshop

Is an events management degree providing students with the right skills for a graduate events position?

I am currently undertaking my third year of University and as part of my courses 'Contemporary Issues in events', I had to deliver a workshop to my peers on a subject I am passionate about. The topic I chose to carry out the workshop for was ‘Is an events management degree providing students with the right skills for a graduate events position?’ thus being because I did an placement at TFI Group in my third year of study which made me realise that as much as degree is good. I do not believe it is enough to prepare you for the working events industry. There were 5 of us signed up for the workshop, myself, Noemi La Torre, Ellie Cunningham, Beth Young, Yvie Hampshire in the group. Four of us had done placements before and one of us had not. This worked in our favour as there was a natural split on opinion on this topic.

Development of workshop content

We then arranged meeting times in the lead up to when our workshop needed to be delivered on 9th February 2018. We met up every week to discuss our ideas and finalise the structure. When we first started our meeting there was a pretty clear divide on how the placement students felt towards this topic and the non-placement students felt. This provided good discussion and set a good structure on how we would rung the workshop due to the conflicting opinions. We wanted to make the workshop interactive to grab the attention of our audience. We did this by placing into our presentation a few group and solo activities the students would have to get involved in.  We wanted to have a clear statement of the workshop objectives. We used an audience poll to set the context.

The delivery of the Workshop

We all took on sections of the workshop to deliver. The workshop material included a review of current graduate job roles which was useful to students intending to work in the events industry which I covered. This was interactive as the students were in groups, and then had to feedback what they thought interviewers would look for in this role. I though the group played this out very well and actually managed to come up with a lot of the skills needed. It was interesting to see what had been missed. We found that even though the jobs could be very different there were a lot of the same basic skills and attributes that companies looked for in their employees. However we didn’t keep to the time period for this section, we spoke a lot more in detail about each job which I should have pushed on quicker. In result to this the debate later on suffered as there should have been opportunity to make the class debate last longer unfortunately as it did not take as long points were missed and it didn’t get as heated as it could have. The lectures fed back to us that the second half of the workshop should have been more interactive as the energy in the room started to dip a bit. This was also a result on too much time taken on the first half.

A big section in our delivery was based on our own experiences in the placements we had completed and subsequently all gained part time jobs from. We brought for and against reasoning to the topic and overall how we think the degree should include more structured work experience opportunities. The feedback given on this was that it would have been interesting to develop with the group given the current discussions on industry blogs about this, so as to move the discussion to a really useful and informative conclusion. We could have achieved this by challenging the students to choose a clear position in the debate and encourage them to share their experiences from their recent job searches and encounters with prospective employers.

Teamwork and Conclusion

Overall I think as a team we worked professional in the delivery of the workshop. I think we were all a little nervous which showed at the start. Even though there were parts of the workshop that didt run on time I think we covered this up well and made time up in other areas and still managed to cover all objectives set. We managed to engage our audience with polls and interactive discussions which kept them engaged for the most part of our workshop. I believe as a group we developed a workshop on a topic that has been vigorously debated in the events industry for a while. We provided some interesting content relating to each side of the debate and backed this up with a video we created of event professionals in the industry discussing this issue.