Last week I had the opportunity to attend an advisor conference in Orlando, Florida. I was excited to attend this conference to learn more about advising issues that are going on throughout the country, as well as to observe the presentations and see how they fit with what I’m learning in class.
The first thing that I tried to keep in mind as I attended the breakout sessions was the following: “Is this session something that training can take care of?” Some of the sessions I went to fit the description great, and was definitely something that training needed to fix, others were more of pure information, while a few were just boring in and of themselves.
When getting ready to go to the breakout sessions, I would read the description about the session, and then try to see if the description really fit. Some of the presenters were right on…while others were way out in left field from what the description said. Also, I could tell which presenters started with the “end in sight” and those that just “threw it together.”
The one breakout session that really caught my mind, started with the end in sight. This presentation was titled “Fast Pass Treatment: Staff Retreats are Worth the Price of an ‘E-Ticket’.” This course first caught my attention because of the words “STAFF RETREAT.” It has been a long time since I have attended a staff retreat and was something that I was really interested in. I also thought that this topic is definitely something that training or teaching could fix. A lot of companies plan on having what they call staff retreats, but in the end they all turn out to be really long and boring staff meetings. The ladies that presented on this topic definitely had specific goals and objects that they wanted to cover, as well as handouts and a CD for each audience member with templates, games, agendas, and everything else that a newbie would need to plan a great staff retreat.
I was excited to see that with great planning and preparation the tools that we are learning about can be applied outside the classroom setting.
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