The Future of Events in Technical Education
The feeling of uncertainty is running high with the suspension of in-person events. In the age of social distancing, face-to-face events are temporarily on hold. As organizations wrestle with how to supplement the intelligence they have gathered from in-person events in the past, many are looking to virtual events as a potential replacement.
We’re all trying to feel things out, and ultimately figure out how to plan for the future, which is going to look different for a while. There is some feeling of paralysis, of not being sure what to do, in terms of what the future will look like. The question is, what can companies and educators replace in-person events with right now? This is where I think that fear and uncertainty come in because right now, there isn’t a standard playbook.
It ends up being initially a technology challenge, but then it’s not down the line. There are a lot of platforms out there, but not many people know about virtual platforms because they were running in-person events. The number one difference from being successful and moving an in-person event to a virtual event comes down to the strategy being very specific. One, do you even have a strategy? What are the objectives you want to bring. We know there’s some risk involved, but we want our customers to go and do it. So, I think it’s more strategy-led. Although technology is the solution, a lot of conversations I’ve had with individuals are paralyzed when it comes to creating the strategy. They have trouble knowing what to do, and that has nothing to do with the technology. They just have to understand the objectives of the event.
Moving forward, it just opens up bigger opportunities for Technical Education Post, to offer digital products for events that we haven’t had the ability or maybe the need for. I think the current belief is that there’s going to be an elastic band that will spring back to the in-person events of 2019. But that may not be the right view. I do believe that this is going to be a change, as there are always changes in certain industries. I believe that we’re going to learn a lot from this. It’s going to be a continuum. I believe we should take this moment and learn from it. We can’t just expect it to go back to normal.
Tom Shaw
tomshaw@techedmagazine.com
734.338.3290
