The exhibitions' sector faces, in my opinion, three major challenges in the short to medium term. Challenges that represent opportunities for us, exhibition contractors, to remake the relationships and processes that define how we work and who we work with. I’m talking about Brexit, recruitment and safety.
The exhibition industry works internationally, and for a long time we’ve enjoyed unfettered movement and work across the continent. I’m hopeful that post-Brexit much of this can be retained at minimal cost, but we do need to be prepared for the unwelcome return of carnets and tariffs. Carnets in particular can be an administrative nightmare for companies like my company, Aztec, which ships large quantities of high value equipment overseas.
Brexit is going to precipitate an increased demand for talented recruits from the UK, as it becomes a more onerous process to employ EU nationals. So we’re going to have to work at turning on a stream of British talent coming out of our schools, colleges and universities. The Event Supplier and Services Association (ESSA) is already forging ahead with its Lincoln University partnership, and ESSA members are already visiting schools and colleges to extol the exhibition industry as an exciting and challenging workplace.
Here at Aztec, we’ve enjoyed a great deal of success with our apprenticeship programme. It’s a route I’d recommend to almost any business, because it allows us to train new arrivals in our way of doing things, and our apprentices are immersed in a ‘can-do’ culture of flexibility and conscientiousness. We’ve recruited heavily from Europe where we’ve needed skilled, qualified professionals whose attitude matches our own, finding it difficult to attract those same professionals in the UK. Geographically, we are based in south London so I don’t know if this is a local issue or a UK-wide, but certainly it is a big challenge for us in the South East.
This flow of talent from Europe has been precipitated by a drought of opportunities, especially for young people, in countries like Spain and Italy, but we do have lots of talented young people here as well, it’s a question of directing them more effectively towards a career exhibitions and events.
When we recruit, and bring new talent into exhibition contracting, we are not only providing valuable career opportunities for young people, but we are creating a chance to break away from the aspects of exhibition industry culture that inhibit change. Top of my list here is the lack of a true culture of safety.
Of course, we have systems in place to maximise worker and visitor safety at exhibitions, carefully defined processes, regulations and oversight from the Health & Safety Executive. But without cooperation and compliance from the people on the ground, and of course on ladders and access equipment in the air, these regulations and guidelines won’t be protecting anyone.
I’ve seen my fair share of hair-raising near-misses to realise that safety culture starts to erode during build-up and particularly break down times at an exhibition. The associations are addressing the dangers of working at height with the excellent ‘Stop the Drop’ campaign, but I believe more needs to be done finding workable solutions to what appears to be a shrinking amount of time allocated to building and breaking exhibitions down.
There’s a perception from some that it’s the contractor’s job to ensure that they just “chuck the right amount of people at the exhibition to get the job done in the time allocated”, and I believe that this simplistic attitude clouds the judgement of some who should know better when it comes to allocating time for build-up and break down.
I’ve always been an enthusiast for process led approaches to solving problems, and I think they have a significant part to play in resolving these issues. With good planning methodologies it should be possible to build an exhibition in the time allocated, and break it down again, without compromising safety, and with maximum efficiency.
Again, ESSA and its sister associations are grasping the nettle on this one, and as a member of the ESSA board I intend to keep focusing on the importance of a culture of safety, adequate planning, and time to allow contractors to complete their work in a safe, effective way.
