EAn Introduction

They say a week is a long time in politics, but at EAN, that can also be the case. A lot has changed here in the past few weeks, and as we head into October, with what looks like being our busiest period for events ever, that is surely going to be the case again. Poor Natasha may as well sleep at the airport for the next few weeks (when she isn’t camping out with ghost and ghouls as part of her scary dare!).

In September we welcomed a new manager for our Education and Training division, Kate Doyle, a seasoned veteran with many years’ experience in the vocational education and training space, much of that running her own consultancy where she advised many organisations and bodies and was instrumental in helping to shape qualifications in a number of industry areas. As you can imagine, we are really excited to have her on board to help in our efforts to continually improve our education program.

Many of you would have noticed a few more subtle changes to the website recently, mainly aesthetic changes of late, but these form a part of our longer term plans to continue to shape the website to make it more appealing to visiting EAs whilst also being of increasing value and benefit to regular member users.

Part of that program includes the publication, and subsequent archiving, of more role related articles of an educational nature. So you will notice in this edition of The Assistant, an area called ‘Learning & Development Insights’, a new section dedicated to articles of an educational nature. Most of these will be from EAN but it may also feature articles from guest writers, including some of our presenters and trainers.

In early September we held our Brisbane conference and exhibition and both were, again, enormous successes. The delegates loved the conference, especially the practical sessions and the useful guides and takeaways they received, so we are glad to have that one under our belt. Next stop on the conference circuit is Melbourne in November where we are planning for another sensational event. With the same amazing take aways as Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane, plus some incredible speakers, we are confident it will be an awesome two days.

And, believe it or not, development on our next conference series is already very advanced and next year we are focussing on a slightly different approach. Our current series sees the culmination of several years of research and development as well as some great developments that have come out of the previous conferences so next year we are looking at something a little different. But we don’t want to spoil the surprise so keep a look out for details on the event that will be closest to you – we will be marketing them all much earlier than usual as part of the slightly different approach.

In relation to education and training, we mentioned a new EA and Executive program that we have been working on, and in a recent edition we wrote that we thought it would be comprised of two separate days. Well, we’ve now managed to streamline the product and it will be a one day program for EA and Executive, which should make it much easier to persuade executives to attend.

The one-day program is broken down into 6 stages, mostly workshops. Key to all stages is allowing the EA and Executive to workshop different concepts and ideas and providing them with the opportunity to work together to develop their combined visions and constructs for their Partnership, whilst being provided with industry benchmarks and ideas for them to consider and explore.

We’ve already been discussing the program with a number of large organisations and it is receiving a lot of interest, but to assist those in smaller organisations, or those who may not have full organisation buy-in, we will be running public versions of the program commencing in March / April 2017. A full program outline will be available soon.

This one day program is by far the most exciting development in the Executive Assistant Academy for several years and we believe it is actually a global first product so we are very excited about the prospects for it and for hosting development days that EAs can attend with their executives.

Finally, as mentioned previously, we ae supporting the Children’s Cancer Institute’s Dare the Boss campaign and we relay need your help, either with a small individual or corporate sponsorship of Natasha Cannon’s scary dare, or by getting your organisation involved and doing your own dates for your boss or bosses.

CCI is an amazing organisation doing vitally important work. They actually advise on the case of every single child in Australia with cancer. And their research is making a change. They are working towards ensuring 100% survival for all children with childhood cancers and the time it will take to achieve that is directly linked to the funding they receive. So please, if you can, sponsor Natasha, or get your organisation involved. We’ve include the links again below to make it easier.

Jonathan McIlroy
Editor and Director, Education & Learning
Executive Assistant Network

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