CONTINUOUS EDUCATION NOT ONLY FOR OUR CLIENTS

Member: Mondial Congress Author: Barbara Skrott

As professional congress organisers, we know the importance of continuous education. We are after all busy all year with the organisation of educational events for our clients. Due to the pandemic these events were shifted into the online world. We learned a lot and decided to test those lessons on ourselves. Therefore, we used this approach, applied it to our own education and took the chance to put more emphasis on the skill development of our employees. Barbara Skrott is director of national projects and the person responsible for our internal training at Mondial Congress. We have asked her for a little insight into the topic.

Hi Barbara, thank you for taking the time for our little chat today. Can you tell us something about how the current situation changed the way Mondial Congress goes about their continuous education?

Due to the changes happening through the pandemic, we set a new focus on our own skill development. Formerly we used to mostly work with a system of teams, so-called task forces. Those task forces are compiled of experts in certain fields and thus are knowledge hubs for different topics. Out of these knowledge hubs we used to give workshops and technical training for the colleagues so that the most important knowledge was shared while the expertise stayed within the designated team. With the growing focus on the online world, we added a new opportunity for individual skill development via an online platform. Using an online platform we have developed a course offer rather personalised to our employees’ needs that most importantly meets even the busiest schedule.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the online experience?

With the online platform and these online courses comes the tremendous advantage that everyone gets to decide when to do the online course. It is a very flexible system. Each quar-

ter you get one mandatory and one optional course to work through. A few examples are “storytelling for organisations”, “successful negotiations”, or “how to build an agile mindset”. These courses roughly take between 60 to 75 minutes and are completed by a short test.

A second way of furthering our skills are workshops. With the switch to online congresses, we are now also doing them via Zoom. This option comes into play when the topic is of a wider interest that concerns the majority of the employees. Thus, the whole team can benefit from the informed discussion and input of the different voices. Earlier this month, for example, we took part in a workshop on structural sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace. The team got together online and discussed personal experiences as well as potential strategies to best cope with the issue.

How is the feedback about those sessions? What do the participants say?

Most employees appreciate these types of educational content. Especially the courses that are concerned with the development of soft skills are high in demand. We do quarterly roundups where we discuss the courses and I collect individual feedback from everyone involved. My colleagues do enjoy this possibility to continuously educate themselves and to get impulses for growing their skillsets. On the one hand, this helps them to perform even better in their jobs while on the other hand many of those skills become useful in the private setting as well.

To be completely honest, the extremely positive feedback took me by surprise.

Are there big plans for future workshops?

Yes, the next workshop is already in the works. It’s all about improving our writing skills in order to continuously flourish our communication on all levels. Whether this will be online or a live workshop already back at the office still has to be decided. Similar to the situation with the congresses for our clients we are currently in a transitional phase as in the meantime hybrid events are a great option and on-site meetings are (hopefully) making a comeback really soon. We are extremely excited to continue our quest of skill development and being able to attend more in-person workshops.