A career in sports event management can offer a world of possibilities and opportunities. For someone passionate about sport, it can look like a dream career, but how do you get started, and how can you make a success of it? While a love for sport and sports events is naturally a must, a postgraduate sports business and management degree could help you advance towards a dream career, building on general management and people skills to work in the exciting and demanding world of sporting events.
The discipline of sports business management actually covers a wide range of skills and roles in the sporting events and sports organisations sector, including project managers, sales and PR, hospitality management and more. Any of these roles could involve working within an existing sporting organisation to manage policies and practices or to help make events go smoothly, or it could involve growing a sports business from scratch.
Sports management not only covers different sports organisations and events, but also crosses over into government initiatives, the media, and many other areas, with lots of opportunities to find a role that suits your particular passions and skillset.
The sporting sector is a huge and varied industry, with many different business management roles that can make use of a relevant sports business management degree. There are management roles with national and international sporting organisations, as well as in sports marketing, data, and design agencies, very often used to create and manage sporting events on behalf of those organisations.
Major sporting events offer another raft of management roles, from event managers, hospitality managers, and ticketing managers, to press relations, publicity, and sales managers. While there is also big demand for these roles in traditional sports and events, there’s the growing popularity of esports, which can also attract a huge amount of attention from fans, sponsors, and the press.
Sports business management also has many transferable skills and professional experience that cover a wide range of roles and sectors, including team management, critical analysis, communication, and research. While there are plenty of ways you can specialise within sports management, the experience and skills you gain can lead to opportunities in multiple industries relating to events management, allowing you to follow specific passions and interests with a core set of professional skills.
The best way to begin building a career in the sports event sector is to have a solid foundation of relevant qualifications, giving you a set of skills you can develop with job experience to advance your career. A sport event management course is a great option for undergraduates or as a postgraduate course that builds on relevant management experience or degrees.
If you’re already in a management role and higher education is a distant memory, you could gain those extra qualifications with an online course. Online learning allows you to learn and gain a degree in your spare time, and still get access to live teaching through online lectures and seminars.
The University of Liverpool’s online programmes are a great way to do this, offering a range of specialised postgraduate degrees, including an MSc in Sports Business Management. These fully online degrees mean it’s never too late to follow your passion and find a new direction in your career, offering flexibility to gain new skills and experience as well as a qualification from a highly respected Russell Group university.
A sport management course gives you the specific skills as well as showing potential employers your expertise and dedication to the industry, along with your own enthusiasm and passion for sporting events.
This is the other main requirement for success in sports event management, and definitely not one to undervalue, as it’s so often about people skills and your passion for sport. You’ll need to be able to stay calm and collected in those inevitable high-pressure moments at big sporting events, dealing with managers, coaches, players, sponsors and more. This is where those core management and people skills come into play, while your love and passion for sport hopefully keeps you motivated through the all the stress and the success.
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