Greetings from the Learning Guild team here in the USA! 

At the start of the pandemic, our California home office staff found themselves adjusting to life working from home and taking suggestions from our permanent remote staff. Since more than half or our team is sprinkled all across the United States, we were no stranger to Zoom calls when the shutdown first took place over a year ago. The pandemic and subsequent shutdown pushed us to implement weekly all-staff meetings so we could stay more connected with what was happening organizationally as we navigated moving our face-to-face events to a virtual platform. We also made time for Zoom social gatherings – hosting a virtual holiday party, playing various games and checking in on staff to help ensure everyone stayed connected during the craziest of times. We’ve all managed to embrace (or endure) shut-down life as best we can by focusing on our work, our families, and safely exploring local outdoor attractions.

The Current State of Pandemic

The US has been moving thru various stages of reopening over the past several months, with each state and their local governments guiding the reopening efforts based on the number of current cases and vaccination rates. At the start of the pandemic, California created a color tier system to give everyone a clear understanding of the reopening efforts. With nearly 60% fully vaccinated and another 10% partially vaccinated, California made the decision to end the color tier system and largely reopen as of mid-June. There are guidelines still in place for indoor spaces that we continue to monitor and follow as we look for a return to office date. Unfortunately, like the UK, we are now starting to see the emergence of the Delta variant so we are keeping a close eye on that as it has found its way to California and, more importantly, here in Sonoma County, which may have an impact on our office reopening plans.

Looking Forward to the Fall and 2022

With the successful completion of our Learning Solutions Digital Experience event in May, our team is now deeply involved with the planning of both the DevLearn 2021 Conference & Expo, which will run in Las Vegas on 20-22 October, and the Learning 2021 Conference, which will run in Orlando on 7-10 November. This will be our first time running two major events within 3 weeks of each other, so our team is head-down, focused, and working hard. These events draw the bulk of their revenues (more than 80%) from delegate registration fees so in addition to monitoring early exhibition/sponsorship sales as an indicator of event performance, we must also keep our eye keenly focused on paid-for delegate registration trends. We are very pleased to see that sales on all measures for both events are quite encouraging at this point. This leaves us all quite optimistic about our ability to produce successful events this fall.

In addition to our three major annual events mentioned above, the Learning Guild has also produced a variety of digital offerings for our members and advertisers for years. This positioned us well to leverage that expertise during the pandemic and to grow those revenues.

Looking forward to 2022, we are all becoming increasingly confident that it will truly be a great bounce-back year from the impacts of the pandemic. We see a lot of pent-up demand in the North American marketplace – for both our events and digital offerings – and we are well positioned to capitalize on it going forward! So... for us it is just fingers-crossed that COVID continues to cooperate!