Create a Professional Development Event Employees Want to Attend

Attending a great professional development event or conference can be an exhilarating experience.

Attendees have the opportunity to learn new skills and deepen existing ones, as well as make new connections, while organizers get the satisfaction and pride that comes with creating something exceptional and delivering on the “I can do this” promise they made to their boss. But a bad professional development event can be a terrible experience, eliciting boredom, ambivalence and frustration.

So, how do you create an event that’s the former (awesome) and not the latter (awful)?

The short answer is providing topics people want to know more about, getting your organization excited for the event through compelling communications, and having engaging speakers with professional-looking presentations.

Read on to learn how a small team at Washington State University (WSU) created a training conference that became the university’s most successful professional development event.

Creating a Professional Development Event Employees Want to Attend Contents

Why Put on an Amazing Professional Development Event?
How We Organized our Successful Event
The Week and Night Before the Event
On the Big Day of Your Professional Development Event
How to Tell if Your Event Was Successful?
If You Can Dream It, Do It

Why Put on an Amazing Professional Development Event?

Let’s start at the beginning.

Why do you want to create a professional development event? What’s the need, what problem does it solve, and which organizational strategic goal does it meet?

In answering these questions, WSU identified three critical areas an employee conference would help to address:

Providing more professional development resources, which was a common request in recent employee engagement surveys.
Sharing strategies to relieve the sense of stress and frustration at high workloads, which had been identified as a key need during the COVID-19 pandemic and afterward, with personnel changes and the shift to a work-from-home model for a large portion of the university’s support staff.
Continuing to deliver instructor-led training for the HR, finance and payroll tasks our employees undertake every day in Workday (WSU’s ERP), while balancing the priorities and limited availability of our subject matter experts, who are involved in multiple projects and support activities.

Putting on an employee-focused conference was an opportunity for our university community to experience an event that would help them improve at work, give them the tools to reduce their stress, and empower them to go home at the end of the day a little more relaxed and satisfied with their careers. For our presenters, a coordinated event was the most efficient way to provide quality training to a large audience instead of offering multiple, less well-attended sessions over a longer period of time.

How We Organized our Successful Event

Imagine your professional development event as a stool with three legs: topics, communications, and presenters. The seat on top that brings it all together is your working group and your planning committee.

Create Your Event’s Working Group (The Seat)

For Elevating Cougs, the name we gave our employee development event, our working group was comprised of two teams from different areas of the organization. One was responsible for the university’s central learning management system (LMS) and trainings such as onboarding and Title IX, and the other was responsible for communicating changes and creating training materials and in-person guidance for our Workday implementation. This combination gave us the right insight when it came to soft skills, leadership skills and technical skills.

Within this partnership of four people, we had individuals highly skilled in event planning, communications, and project management, meaning we could plan a great event with fantastic topics, and, most importantly, deliver on our plan.

Have a Broader Planning Committee for Your Development Event

WSU has a culture of collaboration across its colleges and administrative areas, especially for large projects, and the Elevating Cougs conference was no exception.

It was important to us to have broad representation from across the university with as diverse a range of roles and perspectives as we could get. Our intent was to have the right people and voices in the room to ensure the conference was one designed by the community for the community.

We intentionally didn’t go vertically or horizontally through the organization but rather, went diagonally to get the variety of perspectives we wanted. To that end, the planning committee contained:

A representative from every location across the WSU system.
People with different skills sets and roles, from high-level financial roles to data-entry and process initiators.

The important work the committee performed included:

Helping to define the content to ensure it was relevant to employees’ jobs.
Electing to make the conference fully online for a unified and entirely accessible experience.
Identifying language that could exclude employees and providing inclusive alternatives. For example, the name of the conference was debated to make sure it was relevant to all and to avoid the perception it was just for a select group.

The conference should be equally accessible for all, no matter their location or role.

Non-Negotiables for a Great Employee Development Event

In addition to building the right group of people to do the work and give feedback, we also had three non-negotiables for our project objectives. Everything else was flexible and open to change, but the following were immovable cornerstones:

The conference should be equally accessible for all, no matter location or role at the university.
The skills and concepts shared by the presenters should be actionable and can be used straight away.
The conference resources should be accessible after the event.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Choose the Right Topics Your Employees Want to Learn About (Leg One)

For our inaugural event in October 2023, we had a clear vision of the topics we wanted to feature and a sizeable backlog of requests to pull from. To build the 2023 schedule, the workgroup and planning committee’s focus was more on “what to leave out” rather than “what to include” from our predetermined list. We also had strong support from the leaders of our departments of human resources and modernization (the unit responsible for Workday implementation), which enabled us to ask for presenters for pre-defined topics.

For our second year, October 2024, we solicited presentation proposals from the university and from HRS and modernization. The result was the working group and planning committee were no longer involved in creating topics and were instead focused on choosing the right proposals for the event theme and ensuring quality content.

The evolution of our topic-gathering process was successful for several reasons. It gave our speakers the opportunity to present what they were passionate about, and the community knew that presenting could be a boost for their career because Elevating Cougs was now a known quantity.

Create Compelling Communication for Your Event (Leg Two)

Most conference communications look something like, here’s the date, here’s the elevator pitch of what the conference is about, and here’s the registration link. All very straightforward and informational. And that’s okay — you need those types of communications throughout the marketing. But we wanted to do something different with our communications.

To generate excitement and a desire to attend, our communications spoke to the different audiences with tailored articles for each of our tracks, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

We also increased the number of published articles compared to other university events, giving us the opportunity to cover multiple topics over a longer period, such as:

What are soft skills and why are they important?
Why embracing and proposing change is important.
I’m an HR professional. What can I learn?

Our objective was to show the WSU community what they would specifically learn at the conference, based on the role they have. In other words, we wanted to answer the questions, what’s in it for me and why should I go?

Because time isn’t something we always have, and each article required time to research and write well, we followed a template to make creating the articles as efficient and consistent as possible. We started with the theme and moved on to the importance of learning about the topic. Each article followed the same format:

Explain briefly what the topic is.
Share statistics to prove why it’s important.
Show why it’s important to the employee or WSU.
Offer two ways to learn more by attending specific sessions at the conference or reviewing existing resources in the employee LMS.

As well as having a list of topics to write about, we had a content calendar to coordinate what articles were needed at what stage of the conference marketing. Knowing ahead of time what you need and when you need it will help you manage your time and keep you organized and on track.

Underpinning the communication strategy is the clear understanding around three elements:

audience – who we’re talking to
content – what we’re telling which group and when
channels – how we’re going to reach them

Crafting compelling communications can take time and effort, but it’s well worth it. If you put the effort in, you get the return on that investment and achieve your goals, which are to increase registrations and generate excitement about the event.

Photo by Kane Reinholdtsen on Unsplash

Have Engaging Speakers and Professional Presentations Your Attendees Want to Listen To (Leg Three)

The planning committee determined the topics people wanted to learn about, and our communications created excitement for the event. The presenters were tasked with delivering on those promises.

Across both years we’ve run the conference, the majority of our presenters were employees from all across the WSU system. They had different PowerPoint skills, different experiences presenting, and different comfort levels with public speaking. But what they had in common was expertise in their field and the desire to share their experiences to help their colleagues and peers.

To help our presenters be the best they could be on the day, we had three goals. The first two were:

Make the speakers as comfortable and confident as possible with the event.
Reduce the risk of things going wrong.

Both of which contribute to our third goal:

Deliver high-quality presentations people are proud of.

To alleviate PowerPoint frustrations — it still makes me scratch my head from time to time! — we provided a template and the opportunity to have a draft review. The goal was to help the presenters be organized and not feel rushed as they created their presentations, and the quality control review was so they could focus on adding great content and not worry about elements bouncing around the slides, inconsistent font sizes, or other common PowerPoint issues.

Another key step when organizing the presenters was to have the final presentations delivered to the work group a week before the conference. This gave us time to clean things up one final time and upload the files into the events platform so the attendees could download them. It also instilled a sense of calm in the presenters because they weren’t rushing and panicking at the last moment.

To help our presenters be comfortable with our platform, Zoom Events, we did a dry run of the conference, where all the presenters could access a test version and familiarize themselves with the functionality. Although Zoom is everywhere these days, the Zoom Events platform is just different enough from our familiar routine that having a test conference for practice runs is well worth it.

This test also gave the moderators and the working group the chance to see how the platform works from our perspective, so we knew how to troubleshoot on the day of the event if needed, and what “gotchas” to look out for.

Practice makes perfect, as they say, and perfect means high-quality presentations attendees engage with and relate to.

The Week and Night Before the Event

The day of the event will be busy and exhausting. There may be times you feel like you can’t pause to eat or drink. You certainly can’t stop and bask in what you’ve achieved. With that in mind, starting the day tired and on edge will set you up for a bad time. But being as relaxed as possible and prepared will always set you up for success.

In the last few days before the event, here’s how I managed my time and energy during the week leading up to the event:

Monday: With the conference spanning Thursday and Friday, all the big tasks were wrapped up by Monday evening. I gave myself permission to work as late as I needed to, but all the big stuff had to be completed that day.
Tuesday: Finishing the minor to-do’s was this day’s task, with a deadline of 7 p.m.
Wednesday. The last day before the conference was free for those things that always pop up at the last minute. Because all the planned work was done, I had time and energy to tackle unexpected requests without worrying how to prioritize them among all the other existing work. I finished work at the normal time, knowing everything was done to the best of everyone’s ability and I could relax as much as possible.

On the Big Day of Your Professional Development Event

You have a schedule, you’ve completed all your tasks, all your presenters and colleagues know what they’re doing and are ready to go, and everything’s going to plan. All that’s left is to watch the clock tick down to the start time… almost.

As an organizer, you have two more things left to do.

Expect the unexpected. Something will go wrong. Chances are, because of all the preparation you’ve done, the mishap will be minor. And because you started the day refreshed and confident, whatever happens will be easy to handle, right?

Take a moment to enjoy the event. This is your project and your team. Be proud of them. You may feel exhausted, but the compliments you and everyone else involved will receive are a great way to boost your energy, and importantly, show that you and your team delivered on your promise — to deliver an outstanding event.

After the Event (Now What?)

This is where the saying “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” is very apt. Just because the event ended for the attendees, doesn’t mean it is over for the planning team. There’s still lots to do. For us, that meant:

Making the session recordings and materials available. This was a big lift, but on-demand viewing and access to the materials were a non-negotiable for us at WSU. All the sessions needed to be moved from the Zoom Events platform and into the right format for our LMS.
Surveying attendees. The post-event survey was scheduled to send automatically to each of the event participants shortly after the conference. We then reviewed the data, noted any suggestions for next year, and sent out session-specific feedback to the presenters.
Meeting one final time. One of the last steps was to meet with the planning committee to discuss lessons learned for next year.

At WSU, even though the conference is late October, our work doesn’t come to a close until later in November.

How to Tell if Your Event Was Successful?

The expectation is your event will be successful — it’s well planned, you’ve got amazing speakers, you’ve done your practice sessions — but “the proof is always in the pudding,” as my father would say. We therefore collected data to measure success with both qualitative and quantitative results. (As of this writing, the 2024 event has just ended, and the survey is still open and gathering results.)

Here are examples of our quantitative data:

Before the inaugural event, we thought we may get 300-350 participants. Our end count was nearly 800. For the 2024 event we surpassed the 800 count, including 150 people registering the day before and during the first day of the conference.
Of the participants who filled out the 2023 survey, 93% indicated they would be extremely likely to recommend the event to a colleague.
All of the tracks had great satisfaction ratings:
- Developing as a Coug (professional development): 93%
- Leading as a Coug (leadership skills): 86%
- Workday Success Stories (Workday skills): 90%

Here are two examples of the qualitative feedback we received:

“I have been impressed with the quality of this in-house conference. It has been helpful to me across tracks, but especially as it pertains to helping me use Workday more effectively. A big THANK YOU to everyone who helped put this together.”
Our chief HR officer shared the following in a conversation after the event: “This sort of high-quality event is exactly what the president has wanted for a long time.”

Was the event successful? Yes, yes it was.

Photo by Alexandre Debiève on Unsplash

If You Can Dream It, Do It

Planning a conference is the easy part. Getting approval and consensus on what to do can be a little more difficult. Delivering on your promise to create a great conference is the hardest part. But if you have the right people around you, anything is possible.

Here are six tips to help set you up for success and enable you and your team to deliver a professional development event your employees want to attend:

Be clear in your vision of why you want to host a conference and what you want to achieve.
Provide topics people want to know more about.
Get your organization excited with compelling communications.
Have engaging speakers with professional-looking presentations.
Trust your colleagues to do their parts and show them why they can trust you.
Do the best you can and be proud of it.

And, a bonus tip: If you can dream it, do it!

This article, Creating a Professional Development Event Employees Want to Attend, first appeared in the Winter 2025 edition of CUPA HR’s Higher Ed HR Magazine.

Creating a Professional Development Event Employees Want to Attend