Major conference draws top names from coaching and mentoring world

The conference takes place on November 18 and 19 - with the opportunity to attend two pre-conference workshops on the 17th - at the Hotel Bedford, Rue Du Midi 135, B-1000, Brussels.

This is the first time the conference has ever taken place outside of the UK. European Mentoring and Coaching Council board member Eric Parsloe explained that the decision to hold the conference in mainland Europe was significant, both for the EMCC and the coaching and mentoring industry as a whole.

"This has been a landmark year for the EMCC, with new branches forming in Spain and Switzerland and several others on the way to official recognition. The coaching and mentoring industry itself is growing and coming of age, and we felt that holding our conference in Brussels would underscore the increasing international maturity of our profession."

The conference will feature keynote speeches on both days, followed by an intensive series of workshop sessions with case studies, cutting-edge research and practical examinations of a range of useful and exciting coaching and mentoring techniques and methods.

Two pre-conference workshops, which need to be booked separately from the main conference, will be led by the internationally renowned speaker and academic Dr Belle Rose Ragins and the pioneering author of "Coaching Across Cultures" Philippe Rosinski.

Dr Ragins will be giving participants an overview of the complex decisions that need to be made when researching mentoring in organisations and Philippe Rosinski will be looking at the increasingly important issue of integrating the cultural dimension into coaching.

One of Europe's best-known authorities on mentoring, David Clutterbuck, joins visiting professor of HRD at Sheffield Hallam University, David Megginson, for the conference's first plenary session. They will explore how to move beyond programmes of coaching and mentoring within an organisation to a systems approach which puts development at the heart of day to day management and leadership.

The second plenary session will be taken by Professor Kathy E Kram of Boston University School of Management. She will examine how mentoring has changed over the past 20 years and look forward to possible future developments.

The third plenary session, on Friday afternoon, will be taken by leading coaching and mentoring academic and storytelling expert Dr Bob Garvey. Bob will be looking at some of the narrative lines found in coaching and mentoring conversations and considering what they mean for coaching and mentoring practice.

Other speakers at the conference hail from companies such as Siemens, Johnson and Johnson, Lloyds TSB, Hilton International, Ernst & Young and the Union Bank of Switzerland. The conference's international credentials are underlined still further by a fascinating line-up of presentations from speakers from Turkey, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, Germany, Denmark, Australia, Switzerland, France and the Netherlands.

Over the course of the two-day conference, attendees will be offered an interesting and useful choice of workshops and activity sessions. Themes encompass a wide range of issues relevant to the coaching and mentoring world of today and tomorrow - full details are available in the conference programme.

Three types of package are on offer to enable attendees to attend both days or one day, staying at either the four-star Hotel Bedford or two-star Hotel Aristotle. Extra accommodation can be reserved and there is a £100 discount for EMCC members who book before September 24.

Non-members attending the conference will receive complimentary membership of EMCC and AMED, the Association for Management Education and Development (www.amed.org.uk) which is organising the conference on the EMCC's behalf.

For a copy of the full conference brochure, please call AMED on 01480 493253 or visit www.emccouncil.org.uk