Effective this year, what was IAVM’s Graduate Institute has been rebranded Leadership Institute (LI) and will open enrollment to experienced venue leaders, whether they attended Venue Management School (VMS) or did not.
Registration is now open to IAVM members for VMS and Leadership Institute, which will be held June 8-13 at Saddlebrook Resort in Tampa. Nonmembers can apply beginning Jan. 16.
Since the curriculum is all about leadership, and because it is of value to any IAVM member in a leadership role, the name change is simply logical, said Kim Bedier, CVE, SVP and GM, Honda Center/ocV!BE, Anaheim, CA, and Dean of IAVM’s Leadership Institute.
“It was never a graduate year that requires the prerequisite of VMS. You could go to VMS and never go to GI. The curriculum is different enough and has a different enough focus that, whether you’ve gone to those first two years or not, you still get a full experience and get a ton out of it,” Bedier said.
VMS 2022 students at the Opening Reception
Besides that, and “as we are want to do,” it seemed wise to do a little R&Ding (robbing and duplicating) from IAVM’s counterpart, Venue Management Australia (VMA), which named its comparable school Leadership Institute. Several VMS instructors, including Bedier, have taught there the last few years and saw the curriculum as about and for senior leaders who have experience and ideas to contribute while they learn.
While years one and two of VMS are about the basics of venue management, often for young and middle managers, and not usually for people who have been in the profession for a long time, Leadership Institute is for senior managers with at least five years of experience dealing with those skills being taught. “LI is for people who want to take the next step in leadership at venues,” Bedier said.
“We wanted to let IAVM members know, ‘if you are out there and you’re a more senior venue manager, you’ve been in this profession for awhile, and maybe you didn’t go to VMS, you should consider the Leadership Institute.’ It is somewhere they can interact with peers, learn more about themselves and enhance their ability to lead in venues.”
Applicants must be actively employed in the venue industry, working in a venue/working for a company that manages venues or working for an Allied company whose primary service provision is to venues. They must be an IAVM member (or sign up during the registration process), and be Senior Manager (a position that supervises others and has input into strategy) or above at their venue or company. CVE or CVP certification is preferred.
She also noted that LI is different from IAVM’s Senior Executive Symposium (SES), which is a two-year commitment (versus one for LI) and more general in its leadership skills (versus venue specific). A fairly common progression would be VMS, LI, SES, with several years in between to polish and develop the skills learned, Bedier has observed.
LI is never larger than 30 students and averages about 25, making for a very intensive week of getting to know your classmates and “solidifying professional and personal bonds like crazy,” Bedier said. It is a smaller class than either year of VMS and there are pre-class assignments, work that instructors later use in class. There is a lot of small group and partner study and students learn as much, possibly more, from fellow students as they do from the instructors facilitating the school, she said. Bedier has been teaching at VMS and LI for 20 years.
Faculty take time to commemorate another successful year of VMS with a selfie
Asked what he would say to encourage applicants to attend, Steve MacKenzie, CVE, Chief Innovation Officer, Momentus Technologies and an instructor at VMS/LI, replied: “I would go to one of our internal leaders who I felt would benefit from this program and tell them that this program is an opportunity to do a deep dive into subjects they need to know about being a leader in the venue world. There is no other educational offering available that will provide such specific learnings in this area AND that is delivered by experts who still work in this industry. They will come out of it with a massively better understanding of many topics that will make them a better leader, and they’ll build a network of extremely tight confidantes for life that they can rely on to discuss and bounce ideas off of.”
Those who have already attended Graduate Institute “could come back but they wouldn’t be very surprised,” Bedier added, since the curriculum has not changed. It is focused primarily on human resources. Both MacKenzie and Bedier see this as a one-time experience.
Attendance at two years of VMS, while not required, is still a legitimate enrollment qualification, she added. For those who have not attended VMS, five-plus years at a senior management level is required, “because that way you can contribute to topic discussions. If you haven’t managed at that level, you can’t really contribute.”
