After running a meetings and events company for 20 years, Howard Givner developed a keen eye for the trials planners at all levels face.
“The challenge that we had as an event and meeting agency, and a lot of my colleagues had, was there were so many different facets to organizing meetings,” Givner says. “You might have someone from your organization that’s, say, good at logistics but doesn’t know audiovisual, and vice versa.”
Of course, there’s no substitute for experience, but you can always speed up the learning process by utilizing online resources.
“The training and education, both in terms of quality and availability, was nowhere near keeping up with the demand in the industry,” he says.
So in 2011, Givner launched the Event Leadership Institute (ELI), a meetings and events educational company that has grown to offer live events, whitepapers, e-books, instructional videos and interviews with industry leaders, among other offerings.
In March, ELI announced a new series of hybrid courses held in eight U.S. cities. Using what he calls a “flipped” formula that is picking up steam across the educational spectrum, the hybrid class will find students viewing videos at home, at their own pace, and then attend a face-to-face class with an instructor and classmates.
