Carroll Reuben had ample reason to think her job was secure. As director of professional development for Classroom Connect, an El Segundo, California, company that develops Web-based curricula for elementary and secondary school students and teachers, she was running a highly successful conference department where, in three and a half years, she'd more than tripled its number of annual sessions training schoolteachers in online learning techniques.
A 25-year veteran with a string of acronyms - CMP, CMM - following her name, Reuben oversaw a $2.6 million budget and a hand-picked staff of seven. Just two months prior, she'd appeared on the cover of Meeting Professional, the house organ of Meeting Professionals International (MPI), as a winner of the prestigious Global Paragon award for one of her wired-to-the-hilt Classroom Connect conferences.
But as primed as Reuben is for her meetings, she was completely unprepared when the head of her division called her into his office one Monday morning in June to tell her she was being let go. "It was totally unexpected," she recalls. Even more upsetting, "The vice president who delivered the news did so in tears - and this is a very big man!"
To add insult to injury, Reuben's company not only failed to give her notice - "It was, 'Clear out your desk by five' " - but it hinged her two weeks' severance on her signing a five-page legal document, known as a "departure agreement," that would have bound her to strict confidentiality and forfeited her right to use any vendors or knowledge she'd obtained at Classroom Connect, or to sue the company for any reason. Though there was pressure to sign on the spot, Reuben - who speaks professionally on contract negotiation - wisely refused and took the document home. After looking it over, she decided to pass. "I wasn't that desperate for two grand," she says.
It might have comforted Reuben to know she wasn't alone. That same month, some 3,000 miles away, Laura Goodrich, CMM, manager of client programs for SCT Energy, Utilities & Communications in Columbia, South Carolina, also learned she was being let go, after six years with the company. While such downsizings are becoming commonplace - in June alone, more than 250,000 U.S. workers were laid off, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics - this one was oddly parallel to Reuben's situation, as Goodrich had not only just won a Global Paragon award, but had even appeared in the Meeting Professional photograph alongside Reuben. ("Guess that's what landing on the cover of a magazine gets you," remarked Goodrich's husband on hearing that Reuben was also out of work.)
Feeling the Pain
Even planners who are not cover models are finding themselves in these women's shoes. Over the past two months, Successful Meetings has interviewed dozens of out-of-work planners across the country and documented their difficulties in finding new positions. Meanwhile, through a series of independent surveys SM has watched job confidence drop sharply. In May, just 12.5 percent of corporate planners surveyed felt their jobs were less secure than they were 12 months prior; asked again in July, the percentage had almost tripled, to 34 percent (see survey results, page 54).
Industry observers report similar findings. "We've been getting a daily deluge of calls from planners seeking work," notes Sheryl Sookman, president of The MeetingConnection, a meeting planner placement firm in Novato, California. Mary Power, president and CEO of the Convention Industry Council (CIC) in McLean, Virginia, attributes a recent upsurge in the number of applicants sitting for the CMP exam (administered by the CIC) to the economic downturn. "People are pursuing professional credentials because it makes them more competitive," she observes. Adds Sookman, "Companies are beginning to list CMP and even CMM degrees in their job specifications. With so many people on the market now, it's extras like these that can be a candidate's selling point."
Experts say that the planners hurting the most right now are, like Reuben, those in high-tech industries (although finance and telecommunications are taking a beating too) and those with longtime planning experience. These veterans report a frustratingly slow job market: "The jobs out there are mostly entry level, only paying twenty-two to twenty-four thousand dollars," complains Laura Yarbrough, CMP, a planner in Dallas with 22 years in the industry, who was laid off twice in the past 18 months from two different high-tech companies. (Her non-planning husband was also laid off, from a telecom firm.) Adds Reuben, "There just aren't that many management-level jobs in L.A. for a corporate events director."
Much of the layoff question is shrouded in mystery, as it's becoming commonplace for large corporations to insist on departure agreements with confidentiality clauses, like the one Reuben rejected, before paying out severance. In May, investment firm Goldman Sachs laid off 15 planners when it closed its meetings department; in exchange for a package described by one ex-staffer as "very generous," the company's three-page, dense-with-detail departure agreement forfeited signers' rights to discuss Goldman Sachs, its employees, or any aspects of their tenure there with anyone in the media. Planners at American Express, Carlson Companies, and other firms that have recently announced layoffs did not, when contacted for this article, return phone calls.
Despite this seemingly paranoid atmosphere, not every planner reading this article need put it down and start blast-faxing resumes. Association planners, because their meetings have longer lead times and - unlike corporate get-togethers - paying attendees, have thus far been little affected by the softening economy. And in the booming medical and pharmaceutical fields, meetings, and planners, are doing as well as ever. "It's true that not many companies are hiring senior meeting planners during this downturn," observes Ed Griffin, CEO of MPI. "But conversely, I don't know of substantial layoffs occurring outside the technology industry."
People Get Ready
So you're not a planner at a dot-com, telecom, or investment bank. Should you be concerned? With USA Today reporting that we've seen "the worst decline in business travel in 25 years," it would be naive not to be. But the good news, offers Dawn Penfold, president of New York City-based The Meeting Candidate Network, is that companies so far are relying more on attrition (not replacing employees who leave or retire) and budget cutbacks than on downsizing, having learned in the early 1990s how demoralizing layoffs can be for those left behind to pick up the slack.
Still, Penfold believes, planners should keep their antennae up for warning signs and start developing their career searches; if they haven't already, they should join local meetings associations where they can network. "It's very much a survival game," she notes. "I've found that Baby Boomers have a [psychological] advantage because they lived through the last recession, but Generation Xers seem to think [layoffs] won't happen to them. I don't think they have a clue of what the economy has in store if things continue this way." Her pessimism is not unfounded; a decade ago, Penfold herself realized she was being laid off by electronics giant ITT only when she spotted a company directory at the print shop - and noticed her name wasn't on it.
Whether they're fledglings or old hands, all planners can help safeguard their jobs by showing how their meetings deliver tangible value - aka "return on investment" (if you read SM regularly, you've heard this before). If you plan meetings for a revenue-producing department such as sales, document the effectiveness of your gatherings through pre- and post-meeting testing. Showing that attendees retain the content of your meetings (new product information, for instance) and do their jobs better as a result means that as the planner, you're contributing directly to your company's bottom line. And that, in turn, makes it that much harder for management to consider you expendable.
A Job Worth the Wait
In the year since he was laid off from a dot-com in Los Angeles, Lee Linderman applied for "literally hundreds of jobs," virtually all planning-related. Meticulous about his employment search, he kept track of contacts using a "huge" three-ring binder of cover letters and resumes submitted, networked with everyone he could think of, and even hired an executive coach. He logged hours researching potential employers on the Internet so he could tailor his presentations to each company. "You have to be very creative and go after every possible means of finding a job because it's very competitive," he notes. "To some extent, you have to market and sell yourself as a commodity."
Interviewed by SM in May, Linderman was becoming discouraged after 10 months of unemployment, and reported encountering hiring freezes at many companies in response to a disturbingly slow economy. Since then, his luck has turned completely around: This past June, he was hired as director of sales and marketing for Wolfgang Puck Catering & Events, a newly created position drawing on Linderman's pre-dot-com days as director of catering for the Patina Group, an independent planning firm, where he organized high-level events for VIPs. Linderman calls it "a dream job," which he landed after six months of back-and-forth discussions with the company. "I can write my own job description."
Tenacity and patience like Linderman's will eventually pay off, planners and experts say. "[This slowdown] is not the death of meeting planning," offers Sookman. "If you still love this work, you just have to figure out how to manage the current situation. There's just been a temporary economic shift - the pendulum will eventually swing back."
For now, it seems the only thing planners need fear is fear itself. After her boss hinted back in January that she might be out of a job soon, "I wasted about a month being paranoid," recalls Laura Goodrich, the Global Paragon winner who was let go in June. "But you have to remind yourself that the worst that can happen is you'll get another job. You can't think about the 'why.' Just remember how good you are at what you do, and stay positive. Otherwise, you undermine your own efforts."
Assistant Editor Ben Chapman contributed to this article.