Australia’s economic growth over more than a decade and a half is nothing short of spectacular with the country having weathered convulsions by trade partners in many parts of the world with barely a backward glance.

With unemployment at a 30 year low, there are signs all over that a significant skills shortage threatens the growth of the meetings and events sectors.

While there tends to be significant stability in the senior management of convention centres around the country, venue operators, meeting planners and suppliers to the industry face ongoing challenges with personnel in the middle management arena.

In an industry where a meeting or event may be several years in the planning and the development of professional relationships and trust is an essential element for a successful outcome, the chopping and changing of account managers can be extremely disruptive.

As demographer Bernard Salt noted at the recent MEA National Conference in Hobart, Australia is bleeding some 67,000 citizens a year heading off to find their fortunes overseas. This exodus of often well educated people is only partially filled by immigrants and the trend indicates this will continue.
Roslyn McLeod, who heads the largest stand-alone meetings management company in Sydney says the biggest skills shortage is at the management level.
“There’s a perception that if you sit in a chair for a certain number of hours a day, you can do the job,” she says.
“We also find that the two to three year level is where there’s the greatest churn of staff. This should be where they should be concentrating on developing their skills and gaining new ones. In a detail-driven industry like ours it takes time to ramp up those skills.”
Ray Shaw, chairman of Event Planners is even more forthright.
“The churn rates in the industry (not just PCOs but hotel sales and operations staff) are alarming,” he says.
“We are not building a stable base of professionals to help move this industry to a profession. This impacts everyone, from smaller PCOs who can’t get staff to expand, to larger PCOs who need to have quality management systems and invest in intensive training systems to cope with churn.
“It is damaging the industry. When we tender for new business we hear horror stories about poor client service from other PCOs and in most cases this can be traced back to staff issues, not the good intentions of the PCO.”
At the venue operator level, Geoff Donaghy of IFC Ogden who has responsibility for the smooth management of four convention centres as well as a number of other sporting venues, staffing remains an eternal challenge.

“Procedures and the right people to implement them is essential for our venues. We look to have a mix of local hires and outsiders with expertise to our centres in Brisbane, Cairns, Kuala Lumpur and next year in Darwin. It’s a matter of getting that balance right.
“We’ve found we’ve developed a significant amount of intellectual property in our venues over the years and where our staff – including our casual workers – have remained with us, they’ve become a significant asset.
“It takes a couple of years to develop a good pool of casual workers, but we find that because it’s quite a dynamic business, with very different events happening on an ongoing basis, it’s an exciting and stimulating place to be.”

Robyn Johnson is the founder of Conexion, a Sydney conference management company and believes there’s good quality people entering the industry from the various universities and colleges.
“There are many really good new entrants coming into the field through the various colleges and universities. I believe it is important for the industry to work with these training colleges to ensure that their courses are always relevant.

“Over the past 10 years I have been a regular guest lecturer at MEA courses and have also taught events management to marketing students at the University of NSW, Kenvale College and Billy Blue. Mentoring is really important. There is only so much that you can learn from books and training courses.”
Ms Johnson says accreditation is also an important issue. Having people officially accredited by the MEA is one very positive way of keeping standards up while fostering a sense of confidence among clients and suppliers.
She says by its very nature the meetings industry will always have to deal with a highly mobile workforce.
“The important issue for everyone, particularly venue operators, is to have good overall management and effective systems in place so that the impact of staff churn is minimised.”
She says that finding the right people is always a challenge but there are many good people coming into the industry all the time. The key is in identifying people who can grow in the job with the right mentoring and training and making sure that they get it.

“There will always be quality control issues that affect how the industry is perceived. Often it is not the quality of the staff that is the problem but rather not having enough people allocated to do the job properly.”

The Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre has a thorough selection and induction process that has helped with retention. The centre has been in business 16 years and has more than 50 people with more than 10 years’ service.

“Through our selection, induction and training processes, and good conditions of employment we have good staff retention, however, as the MECC operates 24 hours, seven days a week, there is undoubtedly difficulty in securing shift workers,” says the centre’s PR manager, Kirstie Bedford.
“This is alleviated slightly in that in our business we know when we’ll need staff allocated to which areas of the business because our events, meetings, exhibitions or conventions are usually pre-booked.”

Q: To what extent are skill shortages an issue for MEA
A: MEA assesses its Jobs MEA site on a number of occasions per week as well as keeping in touch with its membership base in regard to their staffing situations.

Currently there are a lot of positions available on Jobs MEA and a number of other job seeker websites that are relevant to the meetings & events industry. There is not a lack of people applying for these positions. On the contrary, there are a large number of people applying, however they are often not the right candidate. The reasons for this are:

• People are applying for positions without seeking the job description and position criteria, thus at times are totally unsuitable for the position as they do not have the education and industry related skills for the role.

• There are a large number of people wishing to enter the industry. However, many have a sound and relevant educational background but they do not have the industry workplace skills that the employer is seeking. The majority of employers seem to be looking for people with a combination of education, skills and knowledge, rather than either only education or only workplace relevant skills. This is one of the reasons that quite a lot of employee “poaching” occurs within the industry. An employee with relevant workplace skills, and industry education, is “gold”.

Q: Do you feel there is a threat to the industry’s reputation as a result of this.
A: Yes, I believe in the long run there could be a threat to the industry’s education if they do not embrace the notion of staff having a combination of education and relevant workplace education. I believe to avoid this, management need to provide their on-going staff with the opportunity to leave the workplace to couple their already sound operational skills with qualifications.

Q: In which category of members are the skills shortages most noticeable?
A: Speaking with members and analysing Jobs MEA, shortages at this time seem to be more prevalent in meetings manager companies and at times in venues. However, the issue at hand is one that will eventually cover each industry sector.

Q: Retention appears to be one of the areas that professional conference organisers find most difficult. What can MEA do to assist with this?
A: If the majority of PCO companies embraced education and training and industry accreditation for their staff they would find that their staff attrition rates would stabilise.

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