This year, we have decided not to hold our annual Symposium continuing education conference. We based our decision on several factors:
KEEPING OUR COMMITMENT TO CONNECTION AND CELEBRATION
Outside of continuing education, one of the most aspects of Symposium over the years has been engaging with each other and celebrating our employees. The past two years, we experimented with teams hosting individual and local celebrations, and your feedback has been great! You’ve shown us that there are many ways to connect, so we’ll be continuing these local gatherings this year. Additionally, we are planning a celebration of our employees in conjunction with our 25th anniversary in July. Stay tuned for more details on that soon.
CHANGE IN OUR WORKFORCE
Our company is different now. With the transition out of the Prestige and Avamere communities, our concentration of communities in the Pacific Northwest has changed. With a larger geographic distribution, bringing team members to Portland makes less sense for everyone including time away from home and patient care and the cost of travel and housing. Surely, there are smarter ways to use these resources.
FEWER RESOURCES
The time and effort it takes to create, plan, and run a conference, either in-person or virtually, is extensive especially for the planning committee of home office and field leaders who historically do this work in addition to their day-to-day jobs. We are a smaller workforce now, and the time to plan the Symposium would distract too significantly from the daily work for all of us.
CONTINUING EDUCATION RESOURCES ALREADY AVAILABLE
We know a big reason our team members attend Symposium is to easily get the continuing education credits they need. Conveniently, you already have a great resource at your fingertips–CEU 360. We offer this service to all our team members. They have a breadth of coursework, making it very easy to get the credits you need.
BUDGET
As we finalized department budgets at the end of 2023, the Symposium was a big part of the conversation. We discussed whether it made sense to invest budget dollars into an event of this size and cost. This was compounded by the fact that a virtual event with half the participants still costs the same to pull off, with an in-person event costing even more.
For all the reasons above, we decided not to budget for a Symposium as we have known it. This was a very hard decision, as the Symposium has long been a staple of the employee experience, and many of us have fond memories of the events we’ve attended. But, in the end, we felt it was the most responsible decision for the company to make.
Should you have any questions about this change, please reach out to HR@infinityrehab.com.
