Marketing Has A Career Ladder To The C-Suite. Events Don't Have One Yet. We Have To Build It.

I came up through marketing.

My own career path was janky and messy, honestly, the same way so many event and experiential careers still are today. When I moved into events, I got handed planner responsibilities almost by default, because event and experiential work wasn't yet treated as a role that deserved its own respected path. It was something you fell into, or got assigned, or absorbed on top of another job title. Nobody handed me a career ladder. Nobody could, because for a long time, the rungs didn't exist.

They still barely do, depending on where you work. In a lot of organizations, events get thrown onto HR directors, office managers, or executive assistants as an add-on to their real job, not staffed as their own discipline. That's despite the fact that a 2024 survey of over a thousand U.S. marketers found that 72 percent named events as their company's most effective marketing channel, ahead of content marketing, paid media, and email. We are, by the numbers, the most effective marketing vehicle a lot of these companies have. And we're still treated like an afterthought.

Compare that to marketing itself. A marketing coordinator can walk into a meeting with their VP and talk impressions, cost per acquisition, pipeline generated. Sales has quota, conversion rate, revenue attributed. Those departments built vocabularies that turned their work into something leadership could measure, defend, and invest in further.

Events never built that vocabulary. Not because the work matters less. Because we were never taught that we had to build it ourselves.

That's the real reason there's no clear roadmap from event coordinator to the C-suite the way there is in marketing or sales. It's not that event and experiential professionals lack the strategic thinking. It's that our industry has let events be treated as a budget line item instead of a business asset, and a line item is the first thing cut when someone upstream is looking to save money. An asset is the thing you protect and grow.

Changing that starts with us, individually, in how we talk about our own work. Every time you can walk into a room and say here is what this event actually did, here is the behavior it drove, here is the retention or revenue tied to it, you're doing the exact thing that marketing coordinator does with their VP. You're building the same case, in the same language leadership already trusts, just applied to a discipline that hasn't had the confidence to speak it yet.

I don't think the three tier career path from coordinator to director to C-suite gets built by a company deciding to hand it to us. I think it gets built the way marketing built theirs, by enough individual people proving, event by event, that this function drives outcomes leadership cares about, until the org chart has no choice but to catch up. That's a slower path than I wish it were. It's also the only one that actually works, because a title someone hands you without the proof behind it doesn't hold. A seat you build the case for does.

So if you're early in this career and wondering why there's no obvious next rung, you're not missing something everyone else can see. The rung isn't there yet. Building it is the work, and it starts with the language you use for your own results, starting now.

If you're ready to learn that language and start building your own case, CPES is where I teach the exact framework. You can learn more and enroll here: https://edgucationinstitute.com/enrollment.