CAE Immersion Course

At 1:15 p.m. today I arrived at the Center for Association Leadership for their Fall CAE Immersion Study Course. The room was absolutely packed. Last year the Center had 24 registrants for the course, this year there are 75 listed in the roster. The person I sat next to had read my blog. I felt like such a celebrity!

After a few brief introductions and some test taking tips, we quickly got down to business of going over the concepts of domain one of the CAE exam content outline. But before the presentation began, we had our knowledge tested by a brief exam covering some of domain one's concepts. I got the first six questions right, and started feeling pretty good about myself. However, I missed five of the next nine. A large number of us missed many of the same questions, which caused the program leaders to second-guess what the correct answers should be. This generated much confusion among the participants, but most of us seemed flexible enough to get past it.

We took a short break before the first session, which was led by Michael Brummer, CAE, CEO of the National Telecommunications Cooperative association and Peter O'Neil, CAE, Assistant Executive Director for the American Industrial Hygiene Association. Mike and I attended the same church when I lived in Fairfax.

After the presentation, each table was assigned a case study based on domain one concepts that we were to analyze and discuss. A very helpful exercise.

Following this, we adjourned the program and headed over to Aria Trattoria (in the space formerly occupied by Jordan's) for drinks and dinner.

A short ride on the metro landed me back at my hotel room where I'll be living for the next 5 nights, due to the course and some business travel that unfortunately wound up adjacent to each other on my calendar.