20-Year Prospect
Company picnics for a dozen people and trade shows at the local truck stop/casino used to be a big deal, but now events are at a whole other level. In twenty years, your job will still be around because someone has to plan corporate shindigs that will rival Coachella.
Take tech giant Oracle. Over sixty thousand people attended its annual OpenWorld event in 2013; another two million people checked into elements of the multi-day extravaganza online (source). That's an event the size of the Super Bowl all to say "Hey, thanks for working for us."
Possibly the hardest part of an events manager's job is wrangling the entertainment. OpenWorld 2014 attendees got to spend an evening listening to Aerosmith. If you think that'd be an easy working environment, dream on.
Big companies have a lot of people invested in them and their products and services. If your employer's gotta entertain once a year, they're going to pull out all the stops—and that's where you come in.
As for those employee-appreciation potluck dinners, we're pretty sure the company office manager can handle those.