How event management institutions have adapted to COVID times?

While the event industry has been adversely impacted by the ongoing covid-19 crisis, education institutions that impart event management courses have taken refuge in innovation to tide over the crisis.

Leading event management institutions across the country are ensuring the training methodology they provide is adapted to the current demands of socially distant learning. At the same time they are going the extra mile when it comes to the quality of learning and keeping it at par with physical classroom experience.

To know how event management institutions in India are adapting to COVID-19 crisis and ensuring a smooth learning process, we spoke to representatives of some leading institutions, including some students. Here is what they had to say:   

Sushma Gaikwad, Director, Wizcraft MIME & Global Wedding Academy

Wizcraft MIME has two education offerings- online and offline. We began the online courses almost three and a half years ago and one of the contributory factors that we have seen is the experience that we already have in the space of online education. The online course is not only a course on zoom but is a comprehensive set of courses that are hosted on a robust learning management system. Here students experience the benefits of live lectures, self-paced tutorials, structured assessments and student community hives.

The online course has gained a lot of momentum given the pandemic situation.

The offline campus programmes currently being offered are MBA, BMS and MMS. Given the current pandemic, the classroom lectures are now being adapted to an online instructional design for the first semester. These programmes have been amended keeping in line the UGC guidelines. 

Moreover, the Faculty is being coached to deliver online lectures. 

We are preparing our students with requisite knowledge and skills which will be relevant in the post pandemic phase. These include integrated media knowledge, digital marketing, virtual event management as well as equipping them with leadership  skills, emotional quotient learning, and entrepreneurial mindset.

This is an opportunity to provide quality education and to generate future professionals that build their career driven by passion, explosive knowledge and excellence.

Mareesha Parikh, CEO, The Wedding School

The Wedding School has been very active & prompt in responding to the challenging times. We have not spent time introspecting rather adapting to the changing times. 

We changed our style to live online & have already commenced our courses. There is more personalisation that we are focusing on. The response has been phenomenal. We have been able to enrol students from all across India & overseas too.

TWS has always believed in education & knowledge as a base to be set firm before you build a tower of career/experience. We have been inculcating this in our students over the last 2 years and it hasn't been any different this year.

We have been focusing on moulding our students into contributors, who will be taught the professional expertise & creative acumen to do all kinds of weddings be it intimate weddings, virtual celebrations or the quintessential big fat Indian weddings.

Amit Gupte, Chief Operating Officer, International Institute of Sports Management

The situation will eventually get better. Who knew that within months, we'd be able to witness Test Series on live TV? Recently, the President of BCCI- Sourav Ganguly stated that India will go to Australia for tour. Athletes are back on the field for practice. Olympics is expected to happen. Every sports lover is confident that nothing can stop sports.

The Sports Industry post-pandemic would be a different scenario to look at. The Ministry of Sports is meticulously working on initiatives to ensure safety measures for resuming sports swiftly. After all, we come from sporting background and know well how to bounce back. We are happy to apprise that IISM students have seen how the industry works as they have interned at esteemed organizations and also have been a part of live sporting events. At this moment, students are all set to adjust to the new scenario and changing organisational structures. They're keeping up with what the Ministry and Sporting Federations are up to and are confident of sports with a better future.

For safety of everyone, we are up with online classes for the students. By ensuring constant interactions with industry experts we aim to instill our students with the essentials of being a competent Sports Event Manager. As soon as things better, we have plans to get them into 360-degrees sports.

Pijush Dutta, Program Director, Apeejay Institute of Mass Communication

Considering the pandemic situation we are engaging our students in different kinds of online activations as they will become prominent in future. In the last three months, our institute has created an online social media campaign for an NGO. In the coming weeks, we will be conducting virtual orientation for our students. 

We are trying to teach our students experiential marketing and the ability to engage audiences. This is done through group activities like ‘Brand Culture Gully’ which will now be executed through online medium. We will also be equipping the students with other relevant technologies like AR and AI. 

Recently, our students did an online activation for World Music Day and we plan to do another one for World Indigenous People Day on the 9th of August whereby we plan to create a virtual intangible museum.  The students are coming up with these innovative ideas and we are equipping them to execute them.

We do not treat COVID as a problem, rather an opportunity to think positively and differently for the industry. We are conducting various webinars by industry experts for our students to enable them to think out of the box and prepare them for their future. 

Shagun Gambhir, Student, The Wedding School

Formal education in weddings opens up more avenues for a person than learning by older methods. I got an opportunity to learn through all the possible mixes like classroom learning, internships and now online classes.

As times are evolving, adaptation to the new ways of conducting weddings has become essential. Hence, the knowledge gained over time has to be twisted and put to use. Even during the tough times of the pandemic The Wedding School did not fail to provide us with adequate guidance. 

Initially, it was a challenge to understand how things in the wedding industry would turn up to be but with increased webinars during the starting phase of the lockdown gave us food for thought and triggered our creative sides to keep searching for new ways to make virtual weddings or the intimate weddings more experiential in all its possible flavours.

Lavish Maggo, Student, Apeejay Institute of Mass Communication

In this time of the pandemic, as everything is moving online,  Event management studies are following the same path. But to understand the events from the core there is more need for practical knowledge than the academic one, so it has become hard for students to go on the ground and practice what we have studied till now. 

It has also become a major challenge  to get immediate placement at this time, as companies do not intend to increase the number of employees at a time where there are no on-ground events happening.