Pros
I worked as a producer in the London office and I can say that without a doubt I learnt more in the two years at IQPC than I would heave learnt in so many other business environments (of course I can only comment on the area of the business I worked in, namely Production). The producers are given a great deal of responsibility at a very early stage in their careers. Of course this brings with it a fair amount of pressure, personally I thrive in that kind of environment but I did see a number fall by the wayside because they couldn't handle the pressure or simply didn't want to. While I was there I recieved excellent training in research techniques, copy writing, marketing strategy, budgetary control, project and people management, on-site event management, networking and negotiation - that's a lot to have fit in to two years! They often promote from within so the career progression is there if you want it. Or if you don't head off after a few years with all the skills you've ammassed (that's what I did and it's worked out well). My two years there helped me to grow in confidence, develop a strong business acumen and I due to the fairly young and sociable workforce I made some friends for life. Not bad for a graduate job.
Cons
The big downside is the workload, it wasn't uncommon for me to finish pretty late. Sometimes plans would be cancelled or I'd meet friends when they had already polished off a bottle of wine or two in the evening. But this is true of so many professions. You need to have a pretty thick skin and a certain level of tenacity, people in industry often don't want to talk to you about the conference you are producing / selling. If you are going to let this upset you then this isn't the industry for you. The nature of conference production is that you'll get an overview of a lot of topics but you won't learn about them in a huge amount of depth. Eventually I wanted to change this so that's why I left. This may frustrate some people. Finally, production can be exhausting, not just the hours but the relentless efforts you need to go to to get speakers etc. I would say that it isn't something that many people could spend their entire career doing. That said, IQPC offer plenty of opportunities for people to progress into management so you don't need to be doing the actual production work forever in any event.
