The 4 Most Important Skills For Event Professionals

Being an event planner is a stressful job. It involves a lot of work, long hours, lots of responsibility and huge potential for failure. Of course, you wouldn’t do it the work wasn’t so fun and rewarding. There are some very specific skills that you need to be a successful event organizer, many of which have to be learned from experience. We’ve broken down some of the most important traits below — we’d love to hear from current event organizers who can add to the list, or students working towards a career in events who are working on these skills right now.

Tech Savvy

Not being tech-savvy is no longer an option for an event planner. Events are created and managed online and most marketing activities are switching to digital. At the very least you need a good understanding of an email marketing tool like MailChimp, and a CRM, such as Salesforce. Familiarity with social media and related tools are also necessary. Experience with a CMS (content management system) such as Wordpress is also invaluable if you want to create an event website for free. Basically, the more technical skills and experience you have the better. Good news: most of these skills can be learned and used for free!

Time Management

Your attention is going to be pulled in 15 different directions in the days and weeks leading up to your event, so you have to be a master of managing time (yours and your team’s) and prioritizing. Seasoned event organizers instinctively know where their time is best spent but without that experience or a mentor you have to go with your gut. Think about what needs to be done (make a list!), and order everything in terms of importance, urgency, and duration. A tool like Teamwork can help you organize your event and keep team members on the same page when collaborating.

Interpersonal Skills

Events are all about bringing people together, and as the event organizer you are going to be the go between for everyone. You connect the venue to the attendee, and the speakers to the attendees, and the attendee to the brand and… you get the picture. If you imagine the event as a huge network, you’re the string that connects everything. So you have to be on-point at all times, projecting the personal image of your event and embodying great customer service.

Eye for details

Events are all about the small details, the things that you don’t notice until they go wrong. Check-in speed, wait times, food and drink quality, venue temperature, and a million other things. You need to be the point person for all of these details because one mistake can reflect badly on the whole event. It’s not fair, but attendees tend to focus on the one thing that goes wrong and ignore everything that works. Following a comprehensive checklist before your event will make sure you don’t miss anything. Studies have shown that you only have 7 seconds to make a first impression — make those seconds count!