Customer-sensitivity skills for wedding event planning careers
What do wedding planners do? Becoming a winning wedding professional today requires more than keeping wedding checklists, following wedding trends, and making the right choice after researching the wedding planner jobs available in your area. To be successful, wedding planner jobs demand career strategy, customer-focus, and an ability to understand the cultural differences among nontraditional clients that occur in the course of almost every wedding event planner job. Relevant experience in retail, real estate, or the hospitality industry can be a plus. The ability to manage volunteers efficiently is an asset. Cultural sensitivity, diplomatic skill, and a respect for differences in world weddings are essential. Wedding planner jobs are a growing part of a global industry and deserve more respect than they've sometimes received in the past. But wedding planner careers are competitive, and earning customers' business as a professional wedding consultant begins with embracing the diversity of potential wedding planning job clients in your community.
Wedding Professional Careers and Wedding Planner Jobs Are All about Serving Customers
As a successful hospitality management and community nonprofit executive, Maria Daane has a profound understanding of the customer-service and multicultural challenges presented by wedding planner jobs today. Starting with an undergraduate degree in hospitality management from Cornell University, her career path has included professional assignments in hotel management, marketing, and customer relations throughout the United States. As a customer service representative working with wedding professional specialists at a variety of properties in New York, Texas, Arizona, and California, she has discovered ways to manage cultural issues using knowledge, tools, and techniques that are applicable to wedding event planning careers anywhere. These innovative ideas are applicable to destination weddings, as well as to wedding events at venues for weddings closer to home. They are now available to Members as part of their wedding event planner job training and professional wedding consultant certification at New Wedding Planet.
Put Yourself in the Others Person's Shoes to Take the Next Step in Your Wedding Event Planner Job
Becoming a certified wedding planner requires both strategic empathy and tactical finesse, as Maria has learned in her own career. From 1998 to 2001, she served as membership-marketing director and management consultant for area YMCAs in Oakland and Berkeley, California. Working within a wonderfully multi-ethnic environment, she provided professional support for a culturally disparate staff, board, and clientele, initiating the practice of recruiting new staff through non-traditional channels, increasing the languages spoken, and enabling broader outreach to non-English speaking clients. She recommends similar strategies for wedding event planning careers and wedding professional services in communities with changing ethnic characteristics, expanding multicultural markets, and opportunities to become more inclusive in vendor recruitment, hiring, and client services.
Managing Family-and-Friend Volunteers is a Big Responsibility in Almost Every Wedding Event Planner Job
After earning her MBA at Michigan State University, Maria trained and coordinated community volunteers to raise funds for the East Lansing area United Way. Currently Executive Director of the Foundation & Friends of the Santa Clara (California) Library, she has organized and energized the foundation's culturally diverse volunteers, making it a model for community library foundations throughout the USA. The strategies she uses in her job today also work for individuals pursuing wedding event planning careers: active professional networking, hands-on customer service, skillful volunteer management, and finding creative ways to attract non-traditional clients who may feel uncomfortable with formality or other cultural barriers. Her innovative career-development, customer-service, and volunteer-management ideas can be accessed through Member queries to New Wedding Planet's Business Development Center.
Maria is one of eight Advisors to New Wedding Planet's Business Development Center. The Center provides Members with quick, concise answers to the most common questions and issues faced by wedding planners, wedding professionals, and couples planning their own wedding. Once you're a Member, it's as simple as sending a query from your Personal Resource Page. Members may also commission Advisors to work on Special Assignments where one-to-one interaction and collaboration is utilized to produce a comprehensive, custom-tailored solution. Special Assignments are subject to availability and are quoted on a per-job basis.
