Career Pathways: How Far We've Come
Developing a New Industry Standard

By Marsha Flanagan

In the past several issues of The Meeting Professional, this column has focused on Career Pathways at a higher level and the promise the initiative holds for building the meetings profession and thoroughly personalizing your MPI membership experience. Now I am pleased to share with you details about how much work has been done behind the scenes, some new ways to describe it and how Career Pathways will come to life for you.

First, we have new language to describe the end result of the Career Pathways initiative and show its full scope of member benefits. “MPI Member Solutions”—the end result of MPI’s Career Pathways initiative—is a suite of online and offline personalized products and services intended to address meeting professionals’ career growth and resource needs. Specifically, MPI Member Solutions offers an array of knowledge and professional-advancement tools to be delivered in four parts.

• mympiweb.org—your personalized Web portal delivering education and information specific to your member profile and preferences.
• MPI Professional Pathways—your Web-based skills assessment, gap analysis and development planning tool based on the industry’s first clearly defined core competencies and job descriptions for meeting professionals.
• MPI Career Services—your online and one-on-one center for career counseling, resumé building, mentoring and job searching.
• MPI Resources—your source for news, information, research and best practices for meeting professionals via Web and phone.

Since MPI Member Solutions launched in the spring of 2004 (thanks to a grant from the MPI Foundation made possible by InerContinental Hotels Group), staff and volunteers have:

• Held focus groups equaling 174 hours and involving 78 members in seven cities in theU.S., Canada and Europe.
• Identified 176 core skills and competencies in 13 skill families.
• Collected 85 job descriptions.
• Built 188 use cases for mympiweb.org.
• Received 1,060 corporate, association and independent planner responses to a detailed skills survey sent to 7,450 members.
• Logged more than 9,000 staff and volunteer hours on development.

The first visible representation of this work will be available at this month’s World Education Congress, where we will show a demonstration of MPI Professional Pathways planner skills assessment and solicit delegates’ feedback.

The assessment will help you identify what you do today and how to grow as a meeting professional. Once you have completed the online self-assessment, an immediate analysis report will show where your skills match the industry job descriptions, where they exceed the descriptions, or where you may need additional training. This will enable you and MPI to develop your action plan—including personalized education, books and other resources—to grow professionally in your current job, your next job, or the job you want to have in 10 years.

MPI Member Solutions is more than just a new Web site; it is a completely new way of doing business for MPI. It will:

• Personalize your membership experience.
• Increase your influence and help you earn a more strategic role within your organization through the most customized educational experience in our industry.
• Increase awareness that being a meeting professional is a viable career option with a lifetime of development opportunities.
• Help us engage students, who are our next generation of leaders.
• Utilize the expertise of faculty who are delivering meetings curricula in universities and colleges worldwide.

I hope that you are as excited as we are about MPI Member Solutions. We welcome your feedback as we prepare for the program launch in January.

MARSHA FLANAGAN is MPI’s vice presidentof professional development. Contact her at mflanagan@mpiweb.org.