How to Excel in Your Event and Wedding Planning Course
If you’ve enrolled in an online event and wedding planning course, it’s hopefully because you want to learn something, improve your skills, and kick-start a successful career in event planning and wedding organizing. This means that your event and wedding planning course should actually challenge you, shouldn’t it? If your course is easy breezy, spoiler alert: you’ve probably wasted your money!
The QC Event and Wedding Planning course is comprehensive, but if you really want to excel in your program, you’ll have to work for it. Here are a few tips to help you excel in your course!
1: Follow the course guide
Your QC program comes with a detailed course guide that tells you exactly when to read each book, watch each video, and complete each assignment. You should follow your course guide.
We’ll say that again: You. Should. Follow. Your. Course. Guide.
Trained course developers and expert instructors have spent hours on end developing the course so that it can be the most beneficial to you in a certain order. Sure, you can receive your course materials and just start reading whatever book looks most attractive to you, but you’ll quickly find that this won’t work all that well. When it comes time to do your assignments, skipping around with what you read could mean that don’t have all the right tools or the fresh knowledge needed to do your best work.
So do yourself a favor: follow the path that’s laid out for you to get the most out of your course.
2: Make a study plan
You want a career in event and wedding planning, so logically your schooling is likewise centered around this field. Hopefully that means you’re an inherently organized person! (Trust me, you need to be in order to be a professional planner.) So put those skills to use, and plan how you’ll complete your course work in advance.
With an online course, there are no deadlines for assignments. No one will make you sit down and work on your studies. You have to be disciplined enough to get through your course yourself. It’s easy to put your studies off until next week, or maybe even next month. When you receive your course materials, sit down with your course guide and a calendar. Create a realistic schedule and set goals for yourself to achieve.
It’s totally possible to complete your course within 4-6 months by dedicating a few hours per week to your studies. That’s not too much to ask, right?
3: Take notes
The online course is laid out for you, and you have the course books handy. Why should you take notes when you can just refer to the book?
Well, for a couple of reasons:
1. Taking notes allows your brain to process the information you’re given.
If you read (or hear) something and write it down, you’re more likely to absorb the information and remember it later. Your notes are a concise way of pulling out the most relevant information from the course, in a way that makes sense to you.
2. You don’t have the information from the videos written down anywhere.
Just a head’s up: there’s a LOT of important information in those videos! So as you’re watching the videos, take the time to jot down important points to refer back to later. Of course, you can always go back and re-watch any video – but having quick notes already on-hand will save you time and help you retain that info, too.
Not everyone learns the same way, and that’s why your notes will help so much. Some student notes are re-written blocks from the course books. Others are bulleted lists galore. Others are diagrams. Figure out what method of note taking makes most sense for your learning style, and run with it!
4: Practice like it’s real
Your event and wedding planning course is designed to take you through real-world scenarios that will prepare you for your real-world career in event planning. Practical assignments include case studies, where you’re put in the shoes of a professional event planner in different scenarios. Many of these scenarios are based on ones that QC tutors and instructors have personally encountered in the past.
Oh sure, since it’s “just an assignment”, you can take the easy way out and simply regurgitate the information from your course books that you think your tutor will want to hear. That might get you a passing grade.
But you’ll gain way more insight and actual experience if you treat every assignment as if you’re working with an real, live client. Be thorough, and ask questions. If you plan on going above and beyond for your clients once your business is up and running, now is the best time to get into those habits!
I guarantee you, your tutor will be able to tell how much effort you put into each assignment.
Pro tip: Don’t submit your first draft of an assignment. Take the time to actually practice and polish your work. The work you eventually submit might be absolutely nothing like the first draft, and that’s okay. You’ll learn along the way!
5: Really listen to your tutor’s feedback
Your tutor takes the time to carefully review all your assignments. They also then take the time to provide you with detailed audio feedback on your work. When you get a good grade on an assignment, it’s tempting to give yourself a pat on the back and then move onto the next unit. But trust me, even if you get an A+, odds are your tutor’s feedback will give you some valuable insight for future work.
For instance: if you did well on an assignment, do you know exactly why you did well? Your tutor’s feedback will highlight exactly why and how you got a high grade – and it’s not always for obvious reasons. Whatever encouragement they give you, be sure to use that feedback in future assignments! Remember, you’ll never do everything 100% perfectly – there will ALWAYS be room to improve and get better!
On the flip side, if you didn’t do so well on an assignment, the tutor’s feedback will clearly explain where you went wrong. Take their advice to heart and see if you can improve your work on your own. It’s important to try to not take a tutor’s feedback personally, because it’s never meant as a personal jab against you. But we still understand that when you receive a less-than-stellar grade on an assignment you worked hard on, it can hurt! Just try to remember that your tutor is only ever looking out for you and your best interests. They want to help you learn from your mistakes and improve next time.
Mistakes are normal. Learning from them is a skill.
You don’t necessarily have to re-submit an assignment because you did poorly on it (though you can if you want to). But you should at least re-do it on your own, to ensure you’ve understood your tutor’s feedback.
6: Complete the optional work
Some of the units and assignments in your course are optional. This includes most of the business content. Many students opt to skip these parts of their online course. In a way, I can totally understand the impulse: you’ve completed the event and wedding planning content, which is arguably all you really wanted to learn about anyway, right? On top of that, of course, you’re eager to graduate and start your career in event planning!
Here’s the thing: the optional course work is there for your benefit. The material it cover is also the KEY to your success in the event and wedding planning industry! Whether you’re planning on starting your own business or not, you’re at least going to work for an event planning business one day. The skills you learn in the optional business section of your course will make you a more marketable job candidate.
When you take the plunge and enroll in an online event and wedding planning course, we certainly hope it’s because you expect to be put to task and do the work! Using these 6 handy tips and your own determination, any student can excel in QC’s online courses!
