AMGA Annual Meeting

As you’re probably aware, we here at The National Center for Outdoor Adventure & Education (NCOAE) do a lot more than just organize backcountry trips for teens, Outdoor Educator courses for outdoor education industry professionals, GAP Year Programs for college-age students, and wilderness medicine and EMT training for anyone desirous of such certifications.

For certain, our wilderness outings and trainings are our bread and butter, focusing as they do on three-day to three-month adventures targeting everything from mountaineering to surfing and certification-granting trainings ranging from Emergency Medical Technician training to Leave No Trace ethics.

But among our tasks — and admittedly it’s more of a rewarding commitment than a task — is giving back to the outdoor education and adventure recreation industry what was so freely given to us. Our aim has always been to serve as a clearinghouse for information related to our profession, and one of the ways we do that is promote and participate in select outdoor industry meetings, markets and conferences.

And by promote, we mean we go the extra step to keep our industry peers up to date on happenings that affect our employees, our clients, our profession and of course, the environment. We want to get the word out about these upcoming and most important outdoor shows, seminars and confabs.

Having said this, what we offer below is a list of upcoming outdoor industry conferences and events that you might consider attending. Here’s what the calendar looks like for the rest of 2018 and the beginning of 2019: (more…)

Volunteers who produced AEE’s 38th Annual International Conference (credit: AEE).

If you’re at all interested in a career in outdoor or adventure education and just don’t know where to start, we’re here to tell you that there are whole slew of outdoor education conferences that you can attend – and other things you can do right now – to improve your chance of being hired by a quality organization like The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE). For instance, you could:

• Become certified in wilderness medicine: There are lots of organizations that provide wilderness medicine training, including NCOAE. At a bare minimum, you should have your Wilderness First Responder certification if you’re serious about working in the outdoor education field.

• Learn about the theory of experiential education: We recommend reading Theory and Practice of Experiential Education. Published by the Association for Experiential Education (AEE), this book – which is now in its 4th edition – contains everything you need to know about both the theory behind – and practice of – experiential education.

• Join an industry membership association: All of the really great outdoor education practitioners belong to at least one industry membership or trade association. For a list of associations to consider joining, visit the NCOAE Resources page online

• Attend an outdoor industry conference or trade show: Once you know for sure that working in outdoor and experiential education is what you want to be doing, you should plan on attending at least one outdoor industry-related conference or trade show.

And speaking of outdoor industry conferences and trade shows, here’s a short rundown of the ones we feel you should know about: (more…)