5 Professional Benefits Of Event Planning

By Julia Dunn on September 26, 2016

College students know that many events take place on their university campus each week during the school year — some purely for fun or socializing purposes and others for a more educational or co-curricular experience centered around an important topic.

While events are always a lot of fun for participants and attendees, it’s easy to forget the immense amount of effort that goes into planning them if you’re not a planner yourself. Event planning is a dynamic activity that can bring lucrative professional benefits to student planners, many of which are extremely useful in post-graduation settings like a full-time job.

Here are five valuable and marketable skills you can gain from being a student event planner:

Image via Pixabay.com

Attention to detail

Want to hold a pop-up booth outside the dorms to celebrate LGBTQ pride this year with crafts? You’ll first need to put in a tech request, and get a box going with tape, markers, craft supplies and butcher paper to cover your table.

Want to invite a well-known speaker to appear at your community dinner fundraiser? You’ll need to correspond with the person well in advance, see how much it will cost to bring them to the university, find out what dates they’re available (are they even free the day of your event?)

Many little tasks come along with one goal, and working as an event planner will force you to pay attention to the sub-responsibilities involved in accomplishing a larger goal. You’ll learn how to keep organized in the midst of all of these small matters and learn how to prioritize them for most optimal success.

Public relations and communication

Event planning is not often a one-person endeavor; it requires teamwork, communication, cooperation and compromise between yourself and other event planners, supervisors, administrators and outside individuals who may try to involve themselves in your events. Being an event planner requires a lot of public relations work, which means lots of emailing, possibly playing “phone tag” with someone who you just can’t seem to get ahold of at the right time, and face-to-face meetings for logistical planning.

If you think your communication skills aren’t as strong as you’d like them to be, try your hand at event planning — there’s no way to get around talking with other people if you’re needing to get several tasks done at once. It’s much less fun to do everything by yourself anyway, and collaboration often leads to the most engaging and rewarding ideas.

Timeline creation

You usually don’t start planning an event the day before you want it to happen. In a reasonable world, you’d begin planning well in advance for the event depending on its size and complexity. There’s nothing worse than compromising the quality of an event and rushing to prepare days before it’s set to take place. In doing this, you risk producing something that falls significantly short of your vision. You want to be able to be proud of the event you create, thus event planners must get really good at making timelines.

Event planning timelines are useful because they break down highly involved or multifaceted tasks into smaller, more tangible or manageable tasks that you can spread out over a few days, weeks or months. If the idea of planning an event overwhelms you, it’s likely because you haven’t yet created a plan for how you’ll tackle each aspect of the event, and one way to do this is through a timeline.

This type of planning in advance will help you out a lot post-graduation, since many jobs involve project completion. Plus, you’ll generally have a better grasp on time management.

Goal-setting

Goal-setting is one of the most important skills you use in event planning, because pulling off the event often is the goal. If you can learn to set achievable goals, you’ll find a great sense of satisfaction upon completing said goal. It feels even better when you achieve them as a team! Click here to learn how to set SMART goals.

Creative thinking

Creativity is the key to producing an enjoyable event. You must use creativity when designing components of the event just as much as you may use it to solve an unforeseen problem or complication that arises during the process. The more dynamically you can think, the greater the realm of possibility will be for your event planning. You may figure out how to put a unique spin on the classic dance event or concoct a clever way to make a board game night educational. Innovative thinking is an incredibly attractive quality in an event planner and in a student who’s looking for a career after finishing their degree.

These are just a few of many useful skills event planners develop through their work. Most universities have activities offices of some sort who hire students to create, implement and run events designed for students and the greater campus community. Other event planning positions may be by volunteer. This means you can usually find a way to get involved with event planning no matter where you go to college. The experiences you have as an event planner are simply packed with competitive skills students need to have in and after college, so what do you have to lose?

Follow Uloop

Apply to Write for Uloop News

Join the Uloop News Team

Discuss This Article

Back to Top

Log In

Contact Us

Upload An Image

Please select an image to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format
OR
Provide URL where image can be downloaded
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format

By clicking this button,
you agree to the terms of use

By clicking "Create Alert" I agree to the Uloop Terms of Use.

Image not available.

Add a Photo

Please select a photo to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format