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Paradigm Events in Muskoka is a full service event management company specializing in conference and special event planning in the Muskoka region. Paradigm has managed, produced and developed events all over Muskoka including: "What’s Cooking Bracebridge," "Merry in Muskoka," "Girlfriends’ Getaway Weekend," "XMUS," "Live Well Virtual Summit" and more,

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Michelle Planche
Michelle Planche is a certified, award winning event director who has built a name for herself in the event planning industry. President of Paradigm Events Inc., winner of the 2005 Canadian Event Producer of the Year Award, nominee for the 2006 & 2007 Canadian Event Producer of the Year, Planche represents the true essence of innovation and entrepreneurship.

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Live Well Virtual Summit: Much of my time at Paradigm Events was spent working on the Live Well Virtual Summit. My tasks included: listing potential items for the event item box, researching possible sponsors for the item box, working on budgets for the event, listing and comparing similar events to ours, creating coupons for the event, sending hundreds of emails, creating multiple short videos, and working on google SEO to market the event.

The majority of my work was done through google sheets, iMovie, and email.

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Paradigm: a typical example or pattern of something; a model.

Summit: synonym for event: a planned public or social occasion.

SEO: search engine optimization: the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines

Website Traffic: Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website. Traffic is considered crucial to determining a website's success

Web Crawlers: A web crawler, or spider, is a type of bot that is typically operated by search engines like Google and Bing. Their purpose is to index the content of websites all across the Internet so that those websites can appear in search engine results

Marketing: the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.

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Communication

Communication was an extremely important part of my daily routine. Nearly every day I would connect with and communicate with Michelle to discuss my job for the day. Every Friday, all the workers in the business would come together to share the work they completed for the week.

Teamwork

Much of my work was done collaboratively with my fellow co-op student. We worked together on several projects, and helped each other even in individual work.

Problem-solving/Critical thinking

My work on SEO was entirely based on problem-solving and critical thinking. The goal was to improve the traffic of the website so more people could discover the business' events. I had to figure out different ways to improve the SEO by first evaluating the issue, and then solving the problems in the website that prevented it from being ranked higher in google SEO.

Time management

Time Management was extremely important for this placement. Since events have set due dates, there's no chance to get extensions or to push dates back. For this reason, I worked extra hard to complete everything on time. I would generally manage my time well, and work extra whenever a task was not completed.

Decision-making

I used decision-making in the videos I created for multiple events. In this type of work, it was completely up to me to create a storyboard and then follow up with an enticing video. I made the decisions on what the video would look like, and my employer confirmed them. Decision-making was important here because the product of my decisions had an impact on the success of the event, as the video would have likely been the first time many people even heard about the event.

Organization

At times I would have multiple tasks to do at the same time, so it was important to keep my tasks organized to be able to complete each one of them. To stay organized, I wrote down all my tasks on my phone, and completed them each in order. Organization was also extremely important in spreadsheets, where I would create lists of companies and all contact information. I always kept the spreadsheets neat by staying consistent with the fonts, and often using colours to help my work.

Stress management

Stress certainly played a role in this placement. Most of it had to do with the knowledge that my work would have an impact on the success of a small business, which was already being hurt by the pandemic. I managed my stress by simply focusing on one project at a time and not worrying too much about other factors.

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Paradigm Events is a marketing business. In marketing, there are tons of different job possibilities, including: Market Analyst, Promotions Director, Public Relations Director, Advertising Manager, Brand Manager, and many more.

Post-Secondary Institutions that would prepare me for a job at this placement include:
- Business - Marketing (0214E01F)

Algonquin | Campus: Ottawa |

- Business - Marketing (BMT)

Seneca | Campus: Seneca@York

- Business Marketing (B208)

Northern | Campus: Contact North (Site 2)

This opportunity at Paradigm Events has given me invaluable work experience, as well as multiple skills I can use in future jobs. I vastly improved my understanding of spreadsheet work, video-making, and google search engine. With the world becoming more digital and virtual, these skills will very likely help me in a future job of almost any field. However, my interest is not particularly in marketing, but more so in business in general. In the future I would not pursue a similar job to the one I had in Paradigm Events, however, this placement allowed me to cultivate skills I will likely need in my future.