Radio 1's Big Weekend...what big weekend? The weekend of the 22nd - 23rd May, 2010 saw 160 Link Teachers and Expedition Leaders from across the UK flock not to Bangor, but to the Frontier Centre in Northampton for Outlook's second Annual Conference.
This year's conference centred around the key themes of Leadership, Safety and Personal Development and over the course of the weekend delegates were treated to a combination of speeches and workshops to help prepare them for their upcoming expeditions.
After name badges were dutifully pinned on and all tea and coffee needs satisfied, our chairman David Wood and Chief Executive Matt Wells welcomed everyone to the conference. Tim Cook, Operations Director then spoke of the roles and responsibilities of the Leader Team before everyone split into groups and made their way around the training workshops. These sessions covered all manner of topics from expedition leadership and management to safety sessions and experiential learning. Some of the more hands on workshops included satellite phone and GPS demonstrations as well as first aid and tent pitching. The highlight of the day for most was probably the itinerary briefings where our Expedition Planners presented final expedition itineraries to the leader teams.
It wasn't all hard work - there was lots of time scheduled for eating and tea and biscuits of course.
Lloyd Entwistle, Director of Sales and Marketing went all "Who wants to be a Millionaire" in his pre-dinner Question and Answer session. Clicky button thingies were given to everyone that allowed you to answer multiple choice questions on the spot by pressing the right button. Lloyd fired out lots of questions about Outlook and our expeditions and there were some pretty interesting results. Arguably the most important / contentious question of the night was "Who is the best looking sales person?"...with Rhys, Steve, Chris, Ollie and Nick all in the running for this prestigious accolade. Rhys was the winner. The clicky button thingy is not clever enough to tell us whether this was due to lack of competition or was won on true merit.
Saturday evening ended on a relaxed note with a barbeque in the sunshine and an after dinner speech from Technical Director Will Manners about his personal expedition escapades.
So what with great company, beautiful weather and interesting workshops, Outlook's Annual Conference 2010 was a fantastic success. Bring on next year!
