The midway of a county fair or a carnival is an experiential explosion. Everything is over-the-top, designed to overwhelm. Flashing lights and carnival barkers assault your senses, and the smell of funnel cake and smoked meats pulls you in every direction, your feet involuntarily following. Each step brings new choices and new experiences. But between the bacon-wrapped turkey legs and the booth bursting with human-sized teddy bears, sits a man with a barrel selling a humble snack—pickles.
Pickles are simple. They are vegetables, brine, and time. If you ask any pickle purveyor, they will tell you the same thing. Vegetables, brine, time. These experts expound on the long history of fermentation from the Roman legions to Korean kimchi to the beloved Kosher dill. They tell you how, as centuries passed and empires rose and fell, picklers adapted to shifting tastes with new processes and new ingredients. A blend of heritage and innovation, the pickle persists, classic half-sour or Kool-Aid blue, ever present in fairs and fridges around the world. Ask the Pickleman what makes a pickle so special, and they’ll shrug you off, a wry smile hiding their secrets. They won’t reveal what makes their recipe “world-famous,” but they will tell you that it’s the adaptability, versatility, and variety that make the pickle so perfect, which has helped it remain a pantry staple through time.
Just like the pickle, the event professional is adaptable, versatile, and ever-present at live events around the world. Hard-working and humble, we have built the environments and engagements that dazzle attendees from London’s Crystal Palace to Lollapalooza. Becoming one of these professionals doesn’t just “happen.” Like making a pickle, it is a process. It takes finding the right person, still raw but ready to transform. It offers a training progression that teaches proven methods and provides the freedom to discover new solutions. And it takes time.
We have a process in place to build our workforce, which involves finding students in high school or university, mentoring and guiding them to hopefully join our ranks. We find opportunities to turn clients into colleagues, adding their experiences to our teams. We expand and adapt our training to incorporate industry best practices and data, and to include knowledge gained only through experience on the show floor. These take time. Time to mentor, to interview, to teach. Time that is running short.
Tomorrow is always a day away… until it isn’t. When the day comes, we’ll need the next generation to be ready. The work of Laura Palker and the EE-WDF has helped us get started, formalizing career paths for students and advisors with the newly established ONET and NCAIS codes. Now it’s up to us to start planting careers in those young minds and developing homegrown talent. We need to start earlier, offering internships and opportunities for students to experience our world as they search for their place in their own. As they grow and bloom, we have our pick of the crop to incorporate into the training process, sprinkle our special blend of company culture and on-site experience, and let time start to work its magic. Beyond sales, design, and account management, we can build support efforts across the dozens of professions that make our industry grow. Knowledge doesn’t have to be lost to retirement; rather, it should be passed on at drafting tables and table saws. We can prepare for the future while preserving the history, culture, and knowledge of our companies.
The next time you stroll the carnival midway, perusing the options before you, consider the pickle. It might not have the flashing lights and playful music of the ice cream stand. It doesn’t have the plume of smoke and spicy aroma of the BBQ. There’s no cash grand prize or oversized stuffed animal to win. But there in the long list of ice cream flavors, or sliced onto burgers, chopped into relish, served as a side, grasped in the hands of babies and adults alike, we find pickles. We find innovations, like the Kool-Aid pickle, the picklewich, or the battered and deep-fried dill-on-a-stick, that pique curiosity and inspire new trends. We glimpse and taste the time-honored traditions that have evolved over centuries, still reinventing themselves to meet new preferences. And if we take a jar home, we capture the experience of summer to be relived one winter night with the pop of the top of a mason jar. The simple pickle can make someone crave the next night at the fair months away, an entire experience from simple vegetables, brine, and time. Pickles: hard-working, humble, timeless.
Just like us.