Want to build your career as a wedding planner
Marriages are made in heaven, but weddings are perfected by a Wedding Planner!
India is well-known for its colourful and vibrant weddings. They are as beautiful as the diverse culture itself. Weddings are not just a celebration of love and the beginning of a new relationship, it is also a symbol of one’s style and class. In India, the expenditure on a wedding can vary from 5 lakhs to a whopping 5 crore (and even more!). The common demand for a grand wedding is on an exponential rise and so is the demand for a successful wedding planner. It is estimated that the wedding industry in India is currently worth a mammoth amount of 100 crores and that’s not it, the business is expanding rapidly, and it has shown a growth of 25-30% annually. With so much cash involved, more and more millennials are opting for wedding planning to be their dream vocation. Even the jack-of-all-trades, the “event managers” are trying to specialise in the “wedding planning” niche.
With constant changes in this scenario, the wedding planning industry has become more competitive, but above all what is of utmost importance is to become a successful Wedding Planner.
Being a Wedding Planner is both rewarding as well as stressful. After all, planning a wedding needs a lot of expertise. Though you do not require a degree to become a wedding planner, there is a rise in the number of institutions that offer Diploma Courses in Wedding Planning. Such courses and programmes surely help you in learning the basic skills and techniques to be a wedding planner, but it is the real experience that trains and prepares you to trod on the right path. Unless you start working in the field, you would never really be able to gauge the realities and opportunities in the wedding industry. To be a successful wedding planner as you gain experience, you also need to have composure during tense situations.
If you have a “easy go “nature, a diehard love of parties and a calm personality, an exciting and lucrative career in wedding planning can be entirely yours.
With the never-ending busy schedule of millennial couples, planning everything on their own can be cumbersome and can become a disaster when the expected help is not available from family members. To ensure the perfect wedding without fretting too much, more and more couples are opting for wedding planners as the perfect set of helping hands.
The very first steps includes the necessary certification which will help you with the basic of planning wedding with perfection. Getting your certificate as a professional wedding planner will immediately boost your skills. The industry is flooded with various wedding planning courses, but one needs to weigh all aspects and decide the right institute. Thus, it is very important to learn more about the wedding industry and sharpening your organizational skills.
Once you have gained the required theoretical exposure, it’s time to jump into the practical world. Gaining first-hand experience as a wedding planner helps you to understand the ins and outs of the humongous wedding industry.
Getting yourself an internship or volunteering will help you in your career to becoming a wedding planner, as this will give you the chance to network with other industry professionals. The benefits of internships are that you work with established planners – which paves your way to secure a full-time job with them!
Marketing your services is very crucial if you want to excel in the industry of wedding planning, and is crucial to get your business off the ground. Word of mouth will help you to embark on this new career path quickly! Apart from that, social media can definitely be of huge help in reaching out to the possible clients.
It’s advisable to not rush into with an overflowing wedding calendar! Take your own time to pace up. When you will start as a planner, you’ll still be a naïve student where all the experiences will be a helping teacher. Take projects one at a time but execute the same with utmost perfection.
Being a wedding planner, you deliberately need to be able to cope up in stressful situations. If you’re able to handle the stress, part of the battle is already won. You will also need exceptional communication skills – both written and verbal – to be perfect on the job. You must be an “extroverted EXTROVERT” to become a successful wedding planner. You need to convey your ideas to complete strangers with utmost clarity.
Every wedding is like another small show which needs perfect timing and management of every aspect right from budgets and vendors to contracts and subcontracts. Develop a penchant to think “outside the box”. Do things differently and stand out from the crowd if you want to be recognized as a great wedding planning professional!
In the industry of wedding planning, experience is the golden key. Customer loyalty will go a major way in a business segment like wedding planning as thriving in this industry heavily depends on word-of-mouth. This will help you to earn excellent references.
If you really wish to dive into the career of wedding planner, there are zillions of opportunities waiting for you. You need to be proactive in finding opportunities and take an initiative to go out and grab them.
Last bit of advice
Learn everything that you see around and especially from mistakes made by others, and then move on to learning something fresh with a new sense of commitment. Your BEST chance to break into the wedding planning arena is to completely “WOW” everyone at your first wedding with your skills.