What skills will event professionals need tomorrow, according to MPI’s Lori Pugh

If you think of a meeting professional, how would you structure the types of knowledge that they need to work on?

It depends on your role. The knowledge someone who’s 0 to 3 years in the industry is different from if they have 3 to 10 years’ experience, or 10-plus years. In the beginning, a lot of your skills are related to “to do” items (banquet orders, AV sourcing and coordination…). As you advance in your career, a lot is around emotional intelligence and how to communicate up to your leadership and stakeholders.

Will AI impact this?

In the buckets of learning, AI is a big one but I don’t think AI is a singular area: we use it in all areas. Our job is stressful; it involves many activities in very little time. So AI helps us decide how to get rid of administrative tasks so that we can get to the business of crafting opportunities for people to come together, change behaviours, learning together, networking.

To segment the skills we need, I guess one is contracting (finding providers, briefing, managing them); another is meeting design (format, programme design, dynamics definition, themes…); production (AV, logistics, tech…). But a recent one has been human sciences (sociology, psychology…). Do you find them important in our education?

I do. Communication is very important, especially when we manage different age groups. And psychology and neuroscience are also important, both to manage attendees and to help us come together and figure out how we can collaborate to reach out goals. I like to focus on planner – supplier relationships and how we not only negotiate, but work together to create something great. Communication, neuroscience and sociology are important because we have to be coming at it from a place of emotional intelligence, talking to each other and collaborating. There’s lots of training for logistical, administrative, production aspects, but we need to teach how to manage people, motivate and get the best out of a team.

And then there is corporate strategy, which could be strategy in marketing and sales (for external events) and strategy for HR (for internal events)…

Absolutely. And our industry has not gotten there yet. We don’t really have a seat at the table. We don’t give people that training to move up until the C-suite and the strategic vision. If we don’t we will be looked at as administrative assistants instead of all the things we really do. And we do a lot! In my opinion, we’re more qualified to be COO than other departments because of how many things and people we manage, but we’re just not giving people the resources to bring up their experience.

Will AI and technology change the way we learn?

You can find education anywhere: you can find videos online, listen to podcasts. But what is important about our industry is that is that you come together with people who understand what you do and experience. So yes, you go online, look at videos, do online work, but you have to come back together with a group of people and share your experiences on that topic.

In that respect, AI gives us the ability to run scenarios and ideas: “if I try this, what will be the outcome?”. You can use it having a conversation to get new thoughts. It becomes like someone you could brainstorm with and try out new ideas. I hope AI can get rid of all the administrative stuff that sucks up our time so we can spend more time in person, brainstorming, ideating, creating things together, creating relationships, because what sets us apart from the technology is the ability to create relationships with people.

In terms of skills we need to work on if we want to be relevant tomorrow, what would you highlight?

People skills. The ability to sit down and ask the right questions, to support each other, to be creative. I see people who are leaving college with great computer skills but they don’t always want to meet in person and talk. So it’s going to be important that we develop emotional intelligence, neuroscience, understand the person’s vision, to communicate in a clear way…

Also we have to be able to have difficult conversations, to be confident enough to say “there’s a problem; let’s come together to find a solution”.

I like this concept of difficult conversations, because I see this as an emergency for our society, very tense and almost tribal. We will need more events for that?

Yes, that’s the idea around our tagline, “when we meet, we change the world”, because sometimes we look so much at our differences, but when we come together those walls kind of crumble down a little bit and we get to know the person.

Are we up to the task in terms of continued education? There’s so many things to learn on, but day-to-day work of a meeting professional does not leave much time for education. Should we value it more?

Yes, and we’ve got to make education appealing, fun, make it more than just watching a video. We’ve got to focus on the experience of learning, being so rich that a person does not want to miss out. Can we do it? Yes: we find time to be on social media, to watch our TV shows.