|
 Hire Authority—Job Market Outlook
Meeting planners and career analysts weigh in on the industry's job market
By JEFF HEILMAN
In a recent report from U.S. News and World Report, the job of planning meetings, conventions and events is the top business job for 2012, and 16th best job overall.
Citing Bureau of Labor Statistics projections of 43.7 percent employment growth—or an uptick of 31,300 jobs—for planners between 2010 and 2020, U.S. News and World Report attributed the profession’s top-tier ranking in 2012 to factors including “favorable job prospects” and “strong job satisfaction scores.”
Meanwhile, a recent survey by PCMA showed a positive result in another aspect of planners’ careers: job satisfaction. Nearly 80 percent of the 418 planners surveyed by PCMA expressed satisfaction with their jobs. Still, U.S. News and World Report’s “favorable” employment outlook struck a raw nerve.
“I couldn't believe my eyes!” wrote one online respondent, claiming 10 years of professional planning experience. Unemployed for nearly a year, this planner’s experience is of “VERY FEW jobs out there nationwide and hundreds of applicants for each.”
Such pessimism is understandable for the one in 10 planners out of work. The rate of industry unemployment was 9.5 percent as of June 2012, compared to the national unemployment rate of 8.2 percent.
But resurgent group bookings alone are a promising sign of turnaround. All hope, it seems, is far from lost. As conversations with renowned search specialist Dawn Penfold and several meeting planners reveal, however, the post-recession environment is one of dramatically changed career options—including leaving the industry altogether.
Reality Checks
After being laid off from her meeting planner job back in 1990, Dawn Penfold—with a decade’s experience in the field—established her now nationally acclaimed Meetingsjobs, the industry’s first job board and search firm for meeting professionals.
“In terms of the job market for planners, it’s been following fluctuations in the economy,” Penfold says. “Hiring levels for corporate and association planners are about level with this time last year, and while hotel sales are up, it’s the same people booking the events. In other words, new hiring appears stagnant.”
Penfold acknowledges that veteran planners unseated by the recession face the steepest climb.
“No matter the economy, it always gets harder the higher up you go,” she says. “Unlike past times when you stayed put until retirement, people were taken out of their jobs this time around—and there are significant hurdles to getting back in.”
On the one hand,” Penfold continues, “hiring managers are looking for exact matches to fill the vacant spots. It’s very niche-focused and industry-specific, and there’s no honeymoon period—they want new hires to come straight into the job.”
On the flip side, however, employers are anxious about making a bad hire, she notes.
“Will they fit the mold? Will they leave as soon as the economy recovers? Will they feel challenged? These and other concerns appear to be slowing the process,” Penfold says.
Read More...
 Moving On
After starting out as a teacher, June Schultz took an administrative position with former Wall Street powerhouse Drexel Burnham Lambert. There, she was asked to help with roadshows, followed by conference planning.
“I really just fell into it,” Schultz recalls.
In fact, this was the beginning of a remarkable 25-year career in planning that would see her rise to the heights of the profession.
When Drexel went bankrupt in 1990, she moved on first to The American Physical Society (an association of physicists) and then to The National Kidney Foundation. Spending three years at each organization, she ran international meetings and conferences—trade shows included—for thousands of attendees across multiple concurrent sessions.
Wishing to return to the corporate world, she joined Lehman Brothers for 12-plus years. In May 2008, she lost her job in the firm’s second round of layoffs—prior to the bank’s filing for bankruptcy.
“I was lucky to have extended unemployment benefits, but by April 2009, I could no longer afford to live in New York City,” Schultz says. “After 32 years in the same apartment, I moved in with family in New Jersey.”
Nearing 60, Schultz was far from idle in confronting her situation. Taking advantage of a national grant program available to workers displaced from specific financial institutions (Lehman Brothers among them), she went back to school and earned a paralegal certificate, thereafter finding work at a New Jersey law firm.
Read More...
|
|
