After Event Planning Courses - Virtual Event Management

If you are in event planning courses, but have yet to hone in on a specialization, you may want to consider the emerging profession of virtual event management.

As you will have no doubt learned in your event planning courses, your chosen profession has been deeply affected by the changing economy. Long gone are the days where businesses eagerly engaged in frequent business travel... Business travel is now seen as prohibitively expensive. Face-to-face meetings are not as common, even within the same city, where a long commute can be a discouraging factor. More and more often, businesses try to arrange to meet with partners and prospective clients virtually.

This is a transition that has been aided by the development of new virtual meeting technologies, some of which you may be learning about in your event planning courses.

Although virtual events may be lighter on the pocketbook (and, not to mention, easier on the environment), that doesn't mean that they are any simpler to manage. As you may be learning in your event planning courses, virtual events require the same careful planning as a real-life meeting.

If you have not yet had a chance to examine virtual event management in your event management courses, here are some of the tasks that it involves.

As you can see, there is a lot of overlap between virtual event management and the other types of events that you are learning about in your event management courses.

As a graduate of event planning courses working in virtual event management, you will still have many of the same goals and responsibilities:

• find a way to involve attendees


• find sponsors


• keep track of attendance


• design event materials


• allow attendees to interact formally, informally, in large groups, one-on-one, etc.

Are you taking event planning courses and wondering whether or not you'd be well suited to planning virtual events? Here are some of the required characteristics for this career path:

• A strong knowledge of social networks, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.: To be honest, this criterion now should apply to all students in event planning courses. Whether or not your event takes place online, you will need to know how to use these tools.


• The ability to motivate through play: You will learn in your event planning courses a host of tricks to engage attendees at your events. Online events present a lot of opportunities for play and interaction. Will you have what it takes to create a sense of community amongst virtual attendees? Can you imagine yourself designing community-building, consensus-based digital games?


• Technical know-how: Do you keep up with the latest digital tools? Can you help attendees post videos? Can you troubleshoot if problems arise during a keynote presentation? It may be this ability more than any other that determines whether or not students in event planning courses are cut out for a career in virtual event management.

Does virtual event management sound as though it could be for you? Keep it in mind for when you graduate from your event planning courses.