Course Description
Leading conferences, congresses and seminars or workshops is a profession: Moderation.
As a Moderator, the entire process of the event is in your hands, from welcoming participants to connecting the dots between sessions, from speaker introductions to panel management and from interviews to announcements.
This training teaches you the basic skills to perform as a moderator on stage, while ensuring that the speakers and dignitaries are the people who shine.
Three Highlights
- Practice what it means to “run the show” on stage, while not being the main person of the event.
- Go beyond the traditional MC role – way beyond!
- Connect what happens on stage with what needs to happen for the audience.
Modules
In this training, we cover:
- Opening an event
- Different roles: Chairperson, MC, Facilitator and Moderator
- Stage presence
- Tone, pace and style: how to align who you are as a Moderator with the needs of the session/conference
- Introducing content
- Introducing speakers and/or dignitaries
- Running panels
- Interviewing
- Running Q & A
- The most common “moderator-nightmares”
- Closing an event
Course Objectives
- Learn to manage your stage presence.
- Learn to connect all the elements of the programme for a conference or congress.
- Learn to manage your relationship and the interaction with speakers, dignitaries and the people in the audience.
Who is it for? Who is it NOT for?
If you ever need to guide sessions during an (international) event, this training is for you!
Suitable if you are a content expert and are asked to conduct sessions during specialised or scientific conferences, for instance, doctors or engineers. Suitable if you already work as an MC or a TV anchor and wish to enlarge your skill set. Suitable if you are a business leader and want to sharpen up the leadership skills you exercise in important gatherings.
It is NOT for those who think that the audience in meetings and events mainly comes for the lunchbox or to clap for the people on stage. Nor is it for those who are deeply convinced that conferences and such types of meetings are fine the way they are when done traditionally.
Professional and Organisational Impact
The moderation training focuses strongly on personal development, more so than our facilitation trainings, for instance. In view of the moderator’s role, who is typically on stage during a conference or similar event, it is logical that the organisational impact of this training is less prominent.
The main exception to that is the world of professional and trade associations. The events of these organisations will undergo a serious boost in quality if sessions are consistently led by well-trained moderators.
What are we going to do in class?
Like all AMA courses, the moderation course focuses on practice. To learn the required skills, you have to exercise and so, the programme offers all participants the opportunity to lead their peers and receive feedback. In the course of the feedback, the guides will share their insights and experiences, gained over many years of practice.
Moderators are the people who guide participants through the programme. They make sure the whole event hangs together, if it were. They are a linchpin, by introducing content and experts or other relevant people on stage, but also by ensuring the audience is connected to everything that happens on stage.
The way we define it at AMA, a moderator is a person who guides often larger meetings, with a stage and an audience – like a conference.
A Facilitator leads mostly smaller groups who wish to achieve a specific outcome or result. Group members are more equal, although they may have different interests or stakes in the outcome.
You need to understand the added value of well-designed programmes, but you do not necessarily have to design them yourself. They are two different professions. Often, a designer ensures there is a good programme and then briefs a professional moderator, who delivers it.
An MC mainly does announcements, without providing any meaningful “glue” between presenters or sessions. Moderators have scripts that allow them to interact more freely with the people on stage and in the audience. They add the connection between the content and the participants, thus helping participants to derive meaning from it. That is an altogether different and richer function.
Moderators come in many varieties. You may think that a moderator needs to be an extrovert, for instance, but that is not the case. Introverted moderators tend to be very good listeners, and that is an absolute necessity for good moderation.
That depends a lot on the context, but in many cases: not necessarily. You do need to familiarise yourself with the topic — not at the level of a specialist in the field, but you need to see the implications of the things people say. Actually, it may be an advantage to be a bit of an outsider. You are perceived as neutral, and it allows you to ask the questions everybody would like to ask but doesn’t dare…
Meet Your Guide
Juraj Holub and Mike van der Vijver
It is SO MUCH FUN to moderate a well-designed programme and give participants the added value of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. Therefore, it is a great joy to have the opportunity to share the skill set with eager learners and see them grow.