Career Opportunities For Women

Event Planning

This is a business which can cover anything from organizing a son or daughter’s 18th birthday party up to major corporate hospitality events with several hundred guests. For private customers, the event will be associated with a birthday, anniversary, wedding or some other celebration such as passing final exams.

For corporate customers, the event might also be an anniversary (e.g. of the company’s founding). It could just as well be a new product launch, a corporate hospitality event such as a sales conference, an annual general meeting, an incentive event for successful salespeople or a prize jaunt for competition winners.

Your customers will be people or businesses who have neither the inclination nor the time to do their own organizing. For corporate customers, it often costs less to use an event planner than to get their own staff to do the necessary work.

This can be a seasonal business, so it is wise to offer planning for a wide range of events to keep you busy throughout the year.

Food Preparation and Sale

There are many possibilities in the food and catering business. They include specializing in wedding cakes; cooking for dinner parties, cocktail parties or directors’ lunches, either in your own kitchen or your customer’s; and selling home-made cakes and preserves on a market stall.

Most well-known specialist jam and preserves companies started this way and grew to the stage where they operate from small factories and sell their products directly to retailers.

In general it is best to concentrate on some sort of specialty such as cordon bleu cookery, canapés or finger food for parties, wedding/birthday cakes, or the new growth areas of vegetarian and organic food.

Children’s Entertainment

If you enjoy being with children and have the skills and personality to keep them amused for an hour or two, being a children’s entertainer could be both fun and profitable for you. The main demand is for people who can provide entertainment at birthday parties for children typically between the ages of four and ten.

Most children’s entertainers have a range of skills. They organize their ‘shows’ in a series of varied sessions to cope with young children’s notoriously short attention spans. These might include joke-telling, magic, Punch & Judy, face painting, balloon modeling, juggling, stilt walking, children’s discos, sing-songs, party games, competitions, and so on.
Another popular activity at parties held in the summer is an inflatable such as a ‘bouncy castle’. Some entertainers specialize in one particular field, most commonly magic (conjuring).

Audience participation is an important aspect of children’s entertainment. To avoid the risk of boredom, the children themselves need to be involved in some way (e.g. by helping with tricks, dressing up, or simply holding things).

Entertainers need to be especially watchful that the birthday boy or girl does not feel left out and (if at all possible) wins the best prizes!