S6E3: Competency Series

We are talking all things meeting and business event competencies!  This includes some slight historical information on why I started this podcast, how it has evolved, and it's course for this year.  I also cover the first MBECS competency - Developing mission, goals, and objectives of meetings and events (MBECS 1.1.01).  Thank you for listening to the podcast and remember to hit the subscribe button and rate it 5 stars!

Things referenced in the podcast:  My YouTube channel, Episode Number 1

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Transcript

Hello, hello. Hello everyone. I'm already laughing and I'm going to tell you why. I was in a social situation with one of my friends and I was talking about my podcast. And they said, Oh, you mean hello hello my friends because apparently I start every single episode off with that. And I don't think that was necessarily something I was planning on doing, it's just how I love to greet my friends that are listening to the podcast. And so here I am saying hello, hello my friends and I'm just laughing some thinking of that memory. The ending line is supposed to be my tagline but I suppose I have a beginning and an ending tagline so that's kind of fun. 

Hello, welcome to the podcast. We are starting something new and super exciting. One of the things that I have always been passionate about when it comes to education is making sure that everyone has the competencies that they need to be successful in whatever they're pursuing. So way back when in 2010 - 2012, there was this major incredible document published called the meeting and business event competency standards, or MBECs. And this was really a critical document. It was interdisciplinary. It was global, there was several countries involved. And all of these incredible meeting planners, meeting designers, suppliers, destinations, all of them came together and said, “What do meeting professionals need to know to be successful in their jobs?” 

And because so many of us are type A, of course, we wrote out this incredibly detailed document that's about 90 pages. It lists out all the skills, the sub skills, the KSAs, the knowledge, skills and abilities. It talks about estimated time to master, how often you use it, your common knowledge. It’s just this incredible document. And I've always been somewhat in love with this document that it just details so clearly the things that these students or people transitioning into our industry can focus on to increase their education. 

I have wanted to do something with this document for a very long time. My very first student worker years and years ago, I said I want to do something with MBECs, meeting and business event competency standards, also known as MBECs. I want to do a series of videos, I'm going to cover all of the skills, all of the sub skills. I want to make sure that when people are studying for their CMP, their certified meaning professional, that they have these videos or these podcasts of these resources to look back on. 

Throughout time that has shifted and morphed. Even when I started the podcast, I wanted it to align with my intro to events class. I was covering competencies that I was covering in there. I was covering different lessons that I was doing then I was talking to guest speakers. I was featuring student podcasts. And I really had this focus issue in terms of there's just so much to talk about and having the right order to talk about it in. Do I structure things like a class where it's beginning to end, but then if people log in later in the podcasts, like this is episode 95, if people log in later, and episode 95 is their first podcast they listen to then they have to go back and listen to them all and binge them. So really been kind of having a struggle of what to do, the order to do them in.

I am responsible for teaching one class this semester, which is the advanced events class structured like a capstone where all the students put together their knowledge, skills and abilities. I love teaching this course, it's one of my favorite courses to teach and I'm really excited to be teaching this particular course. Every so often I do sign up to do some independent studies or special topics which are above my teaching load, but I really find a lot of value in them for the students, because they are focused in a specific area. So this semester I had a student come to me and say Dr. K, I want to start a business and you helped a student start a business a year or two ago. They started it through an independent study - we went through the whole process from names to logos, website, pricing, cost analysis in the backend, taste testings, we did all of the things. And by the end of the semester, she had this thriving business that was making hundreds of dollars a week which is really cool. 

So a student came to me and said I want to start a restaurant. I want to go through this process. And then they told her friends and they said oh I want to do that too. I want to start a business. This is definitely - this is my goal. And then they told a friend, they were like, oh, I want to start a business too. So even though I'm not actually teaching a second course this semester, I am - of course - I'm teaching an entrepreneurship type of course in terms of you've done your capstone or you're going through right now , you're doing your business plans and whatever version that looks like. Now we're going to actually apply these to a real business. 

So we had a guest speaker last week, which was incredible. One of my favorite people in Lincoln. And he said, and I, this quote was stuck with me for a while. He said, “A lot of businesses don't fail because of a lack of opportunities - they fail because of too much opportunity.” And I would say this isn't a real business for me necessarily. I'm not trying to make money. I don't ask my listeners for money. I'm not trying to get sponsorships or anything like that. But I do treat it seriously as in something that is important to me, and is one of my purposes, and aligns with my job. I'm very passionate about education and higher education and evolving education. And I really resonated with that statement. I said I have too many opportunities. There's too much stuff I can do. I need to focus. And what I kept coming back to was the meeting and business event competency standards. And how, it's so hard to find quality event education very specific to these competencies. 

As a teacher if I'm trying to pull in videos into my classroom about a specific skill set, I'll have to browse YouTube for hours and hours and hours. I've used a ton of the different types of event type YouTube things. I've used The Event U and I've also used, oh my goodness, there's so many of them, The Event Leadership Institute. I've used all of these to look for videos, and it's just not done by the competency. 

And I think I was in a mindset years ago that if I started this journey, somebody else was just going to swoop in and they were going to do it and because it was their full time job they were going to do it faster, stronger, better, more graphics, more fun stuff, and it would take away from my purpose. And of course, that's so stupid in hindsight, right? That’s a very traditional 1990s model of keeping the things that you really are passionate and want to do close to the chest because of competition. The silly thing is I don't even see it as competition. It's really a form of thought leadership. And if other people want to copy it and do it, if you're a listener, and you're like, oh my gosh, that's a great idea. Then do it because our industry needs some focused resources in these areas. 

So I've decided to keep this educational, and incredible and great for all of our listeners that I'm going to slowly go through not just the skills, but all of the sub skills of the meeting and business event competency standards. So there's no direct order to go through them. I'm just going to start at the beginning. So for those of you who don't understand what the MBECs is, it's broken down into 13 different I'll call them categories or chapters. Those categories include strategic planning, project management, risk management, financial management, administration, human resources, stakeholder management, meeting or event design, site management, marketing, professionalism, and communication.

If I read those out again, and I told you to focus on the ones that were only specific to events, you'd only count three of them. The vast majority of these are actually more traditionally aligned in the higher education world in business. We have marketing and project management and human resources and financial. A lot of these were business type concepts, because events is a business. Events is its own unique thing. Events has its own special category. We are listed separately by the jobs commission in the United States. We are our own separate unique career sector, but we do have a lot of competencies from the business sector and from other areas. 

Underneath all of these 13 categories, there's a list of skills. So one example: strategic planning. Strategic planning has three skills which include manage strategic plan for meeting or event, develop sustainability plan for meeting or event, and measure value of meeting or business event. So three skills underneath the strategic planning, and then all of those are broken down into sub skills. So the first skill which is manage strategic plan for meeting or event has different sub skills, and in this case, this one has five sub skills. So I think when I added up all of the sub skills once, it was like 140, or 150, that doesn't even include the knowledge skills and abilities. And I have this massive spreadsheet that I have linked reading resources and existing videos to all of these knowledge, skills and abilities for the sub skills underneath the skills underneath these areas. It’s massive, like over 1000 rows, I believe. And I'm just going to start going through the sub skills, which there's 140. It won't be every week, it won't be the focus every single Tuesday. We're going to talk about current affairs and real life issues, but I really want to focus on the purpose of this podcast. This podcast has a very wide audience that people it reaches to countries all over the world. 

We have people who want to transition into our industry. We have people that are currently students, we have other teachers who are using this in their courses. We have professionals that are trying to stay up to date. We have people that are looking for very specific topics. We're looking for people who have event tourism, we're looking for knowledge in areas and the easier that I can lay out this knowledge, the better. I really don't want to have people listen to a 20 minute podcast and wonder what the point of it is. That's not what I'm here for.

With that being said, I'm so excited to go on this journey. I want to go ahead and talk about the first sub skill, which is develop mission statement, goals, and objectives of meeting or event. I know we're already at around 13 minutes and I'm very respectful of your time and I never take it for granted. I actually have an entire podcast on this already, which was my very first podcast way, way back when, a year and a half ago. It's the first episode I believe called purpose. I've already defined this very specific sub skill there and so I'll reference you back to it. Developing your mission statement goals and objectives of meetings or events - it's interesting that it's the very first sub skill under the very first point because it is the starting point of your meeting or event. You have to have the knowledge of the purpose and objectives for the meeting or event, so that way you can define your measures of success. I ask people all the time, I say was your event successful? And they say absolutely. And I say how do you know? And it's almost always attendance or profit. But what are your actual objectives? And most importantly, did your entire committee and your boss and your client all agree on the measures of success? 

Most of the time when stakeholders are upset with the event, it's because the objectives weren't defined ahead of time, and everyone's measuring success in a different way. Maybe your boss just wants to maximize profit. And your marketing coordinator just wants to maximize reach and awareness of your brand or your events. And maybe your client only cares about specifics with attendance or that certain people come. Maybe your client's assistant wants all the feedback, so they can plan the event better for next year. You never know what people are looking for unless you're all on the same page. 

This includes identifying your target market and your type of geographic location, your target dates, of course and any special conditions. You really want to develop a mission statement to specify your purpose and philosophy and different target markets. These MBECs were developed, as I said about 10 to 12 years ago, so I will be updating them with some relevant bullet points in terms of design frameworks, especially empathy, empathizing with your target market. It's one thing to read a bullet point that says to understand or develop your target market and it's another to truly empathize and put yourselves into the mind of them.

I highly, highly recommend that you listen back to the first episode. It was a long, long time ago. We've learned a lot of lessons since then. The editing is totally different. The intro is totally different. The jingles still the same, we have an incredible jingle. But you'll definitely see some differences about every 30 episodes, 25 to 30 episodes we have a new lead, who edits the podcast, which is incredible. It's one of my missions, to allow students to get involved in the podcast. They help to choose some of the stories from the classes they've had with me. They help to choose the title of the podcast. They make the graphics, they edit the podcast, they do all the transcriptions. Did you know that every single episode is transcribed? They put it through the AI, they edit it, they upload it. They're writing the descriptions and all the subject lines. They're super involved. And because of that, we just continue to evolve the podcast. There's always a little bit of a slight onboarding every 30 episodes, so you'll see one or two episodes that maybe aren't as edited, as well as previous ones, but then it's right back up to that great quality. 

I'm so excited to go on this MBECS skills journey with you and one thing I'm going to be doing along with a podcast for this is I'm going to be doing videos. I did post my YouTube channel in a previous one and I will post my Youtube channel again in the description here. All these podcasts are about 15 minutes, and that's great. I'm talking the reasoning behind it. I'm talking the nitty gritty specifics. I’m talking about the impact and the purpose and some of the history. But these videos are going to be super short like three to four minutes and then it's going to link to the podcast for more information. These are really great things that you can pull into your classes. Or to read to refresh before an exam. Or to share with a friend or share with a colleague or an intern or an employee. If you think that somebody needs help in a specific area. I'm going to talk very specifically about a particular sub skill and then I'm going to give a short story to help it stick. And you'll get to see my interestingly beautiful face currently on a wellness journey for this year. I have recently decided to go vegan. I've been vegetarian for the last three and a half years and I'm very excited to do the vegan journey. And I'm working out. Hopefully you'll see transitions on the videos and I'm saying this on the podcast super awkwardly because I want to be held accountable. I'm a person who loves some external accountability. So if you've listened to this, and you see me or talk to me, just give me a heads up. Let me know that you're listening and you're here. With that I will be quiet. I will let you go on to our next episode. If you're binging or if not, then definitely stay tuned for next week. I never take your time for granted ever, ever. Time is non refundable. Thank you all so much for taking the time to make the time. And I will talk with you next week with our second skill of determining feasibility of meeting or event.