The Future Event Technician
As the digital world influences the way events are produced, event professionals are having a positive impact on the outcome of events, by applying skills with a greater emphasis on technology.
Let’s look at some skills being applied to make positive contributions on events and how producers can defend, and in some cases increase, budgets to account for the demand for professionals with these skills.
We’ll look at…
- The technical skills that are in-demand in the market at large, and
- How they’ve been applied in digital event production
Where Money is Spent on IT
To identify the types of technical skills in demand for the market at large and on events, let’s follow where money is being spent.
In the Robert Half 2016 IT Salary Guide [1] we see, among other competencies, an emphasis on…
- Computer Networking
- Application Development
- Mobility (Wireless)
During recent events, we have been engaged by producers to make contributions in these areas. These resources have given the producers a greater sense of control over technology, and have improved the event experience for the participants.
Here are some examples…
- Our Network Team was engaged to create a Communication Technology Plan with Venue IT to configure their network to distribute live, locally produced HD video, to several breakout rooms for training sales personnel, organized by sales district or region. This helped efficiently train a large salesforce in a small classroom environment.
- Our Application & Programming team was retained to write a custom webcasting application for a mobile platform that would not natively play live video. This allowed the organization to stream live video to their company issued mobile devices in order to save on travel expenses associated with the event and connect with their workforce by broadcasting the event live to those who could not attend.
- Our Webcast Production team was contracted to work with Venue IT to produce a Wireless Risk Assessement to determine the capacity for wireless access points in a conference center in order to support mobile Audience Response Systems (ARS). This helped participants engage with the presentation using ARS without the frustration of dropped wi-fi connections because of saturated Access Points.
Just Getting Started
With an expected 50 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020 [2], it is reasonable to anticipate that technology and the demand for technical expertise related to event technology will continue to make an impact on event budgets and outcomes.
The right partner will be able to provide producers the right people in order to optimize the impact of technology on events.
If you’d like to know more about how we help apply digital communication strategy to event production, please call our office to schedule a consultation.
[1] http://www.roberthalf.com/technology/2016-salary-guide-it-salary-evolution
[2] http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/trends/iot/docs/iot-aag.pdf
Topics:
Digital Communication Strategy,
Event Technology,
Communication Technology Assessment,
Our People
