Discovering Careers In Event Planning

I had never planned on having a career in event planning, but sometimes you just fall into something because you're good at it. All of my family members have been doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and other professionals. Needless to say, careers in event planning were not on the menu.

As a matter of fact, I never would have thought of considering an event planning career if one of my friends had not asked me to organize her wedding. She was pretty broke at the time, and could not afford to hire a professional event planner for what was, essentially, a pretty low-profile, down-to-earth event. I was pretty nervous about it at first, but she insisted that I would do fine. It turns out that she was right. Everything just came together. My ideas for it were pretty good, and I was able to put together different people's priorities in a way that no one had been able to. Up until I took charge, the bride and groom could never agree on everything anything, but I somehow managed to negotiate a truce between the two and cut down on the hassle tremendously.

They both thanked me profusely. They were quite amazed at the job I had done, and told me that I should think about going into careers in event planning. At the time, I thought they were just flattering me. Nevertheless, that spring I get a job with a wedding planning company. At first, the tasks I was doing were pretty basic. Help serve food, print out invitations – that sort of thing. Nevertheless, they liked my ideas, and I ended up advancing through the ranks quite quickly. Soon the owner came to me and told me that I should go to an event planning vocational school. My talent was too great, he said, to waste doing menial labor for a wedding catering business. The best careers in event planning, after all, involve running your own business

I didn't know it at the time, but you do need to go to school to have careers in event planning. Nevertheless, what was true then is true today – it really does help you to advance quicker, and makes it easier to get jobs, if you have some kind of formal training that you can point to. There is so much that goes into organizing events that it is a difficult to pick it up all on your own. You can do it, but only with a fair number of trials and errors.