Core Competency: Professional & Personal Development

The domain of Professional & Personal Development includes content in the areas of Change Management, Delegation, Team and Individual Skills, Mentorship, Motivation, Relationship Building, and Supervision. View each subdomain below; the bold text shows each subdomain's alignment with EIC domains.

• Leadership is critical to many aspects of event planning including managing events, finances, logistics, and personnel.  Leadership should foster personal and professional development.

Domain E: Human Resources

• Change Management:  Change management (sometimes abbreviated as CM) is a collective term for all approaches to prepare, support, and help individuals, teams, and organizations in making organizational change. The most common change drivers include: technological evolution, process reviews, crisis, and consumer habit changes; pressure from new business entrants, acquisitions, mergers, and organizational restructuring. It includes methods that redirect or redefine the use of resources, business process, budget allocations, or other modes of operation that significantly change a company or organization.

Domain A: Strategic Planning, Domain D: Financial Management, Domain F: Stakeholder Management

• Delegation:  Delegation is the assignment of any authority to another person (normally from a manager to a subordinate) to carry out specific activities. It is one of the core concepts of management leadership. However, the person who delegated the work remains accountable for the outcome of the delegated work. Delegation empowers a subordinate to make decisions, i.e. it is a shifting of  decision-making authority from one organizational level to a lower one.

Domain E: Human Resources

• Identifying Team and Individual Skills:  Teamwork involves a set of tasks and activities performed by individuals who collaborate with each other to achieve a common objective. That objective can be creating a product, delivering a service, writing a report, or making a decision. Teamwork differs from individual work in that it involves shared responsibility for a final outcome.

Domain E: Human Resources

• Listening Skills:  Effective listening skills are the ability to actively understand information provided by the speaker, and display interest in the topic discussed. It can also include providing the speaker with feedback, such as the asking of pertinent questions; so the speaker knows the message is being understood.  There are four types of listening:  Appreciative listening, Critical listening, relationship listening and discriminative listening.

Domain G: Meeting Management or Event Design

• Mentorship:  The aim should always be to enable the mentee to develop their own skills, strategies and capability so that they are enabled to tackle the next hurdle more effectively with or without the mentor's presence. 

Domain E: Human Resources

• Motivation:  Motivational theory is tasked with discovering what drives individuals to work towards a goal or outcome. Most motivational theories differentiate between intrinsic and extrinsic factors: the former are concerned with an individual's interest, enjoyment and willingness to partake in an activity.

Domain E: Human Resources

• Personal Development:  Personal development covers activities that improve awareness and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and facilitate employability, enhance the quality of life and contribute to the realization of dreams and aspirations. Professional development refers to the continued training and education of an individual with regard to his or her career. The goal of professional development is to keep you up to date on current trends as well as help you develop new skills for the purpose of advancement in the field. Some professions actually require professional development in order to renew certification or licensure and ensure employees are up to standard. However, you can typically pursue professional development on your own through programs offered by educational institutions, professional organizations, or even your own employer.

Domain E: Human Resources

• Professional Development:  Professional development is learning to earn or maintain professional credentials such as academic degrees to formal coursework, attending conferences, and informal learning opportunities situated in practice. It has been described as intensive and collaborative, ideally incorporating an evaluative stage. Professional development helps employees continue to not only be competent in their profession, but also excel in it. It should be an ongoing process that continues throughout an individual's career. Actively pursuing professional development ensures that knowledge and skills stay relevant and up to date."

Domain E: Human Resources

• Relationship Building:  Building relationships is about your ability to identify and initiate working relationships and to develop and maintain them in a way that is of mutual benefit to both yourself and the other party.

Domain F: Stakeholder Management

• Supervision:  The purpose of the supervision process is to provide a safe, supportive opportunity for individuals to engage in critical reflection in order to raise issues, explore problems, and discover new ways of handling both the situation and oneself.  There are three types of supervision: administrative, clinical (also called educational supervision) and supportive supervision.

Domain E: Human Resources