Professional Development

Connecting with your peers and professional development

The Centre develops and offers professional development opportunities including challenging and rigorous workshops and its two flagship residential Institutes.

All our professional development opportunities — conducted under the Chatham House Rule (click here to find out more) to encourage robust and peer learning — are also a great opportunity for professionals to connect and share their experiences and work challenges.

Our professional development programs include:

Regular telesymposiums or web symposiums — phone or online workshops of up to 50 professionals public affairs professionals. These usually feature a guest speaker and speakers and opportunities for questions and discussions and are developed to provide practical ‘how-to-do’ case studies and learnings.

Professional development workshops — these events typically include a guest speaker or speakers and often feature case studies to illustrate best practice or highlight learnings that can be taken back to the workplace for application or discussion. Our workshop program straddles all corporate public affairs functions and caters for all levels of the profession.

Heads of function and senior practitioners roundtables — held in Australia and Asia for the most senior corporate public affairs practitioners, these one-day conferences analyse and discuss the most recent developments and trends in function management and development.

Residential Institutes — held annually in Melbourne at Melbourne Business School and in Asia at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Business School, more than 600 professionals over the years are graduates from the Institute program. The Institute program features an international Faculty and sessions led by industry professionals and leaders from leading global corporations.

Special dialogues — held with invited practitioners around an industry or profession-wide issue, and include, for instance, Asia Pacific trade policy, reputation indexes and government inquiries into issues such as corporate social responsibility.