EVENTS AND FESTIVALS PROFESSIONAL EXCELLENCE FRAMEWORK (EF-PEF)
What is the Events and Festivals Professional Excellence Framework (EF-PEF)?
The EF-PEF is the first international and cross-sectoral framework that outlines the knowledge, skills, values and behaviours of event and festival professionals across the Event Lifecycle.
The framework has been developed out of extensive research, public consultation, and collaboration between event and festival industry and academic subject matter experts.
Our aim was to create a framework that truly reflects the specific professional demands of our industry, whilst generally resonating across diverse international and cross-sectoral contexts.
We hope events, festivals, organisations, universities, professionals and students all over the world will find the framework helpful for planning their own program and professional development needs.
Why did we develop a new framework?
The events industry is split into sectors (e.g. business events), subjects (e.g. experience), or region (e.g. UK), with no professional body connecting us all as “One Community”.
Therefore, there has been no single framework developed to support professional development that resonates internationally and across all sectors and subjects.
The EF-PEF helps to provide a unifying framework and provides the foundation for CEF’s Professional Development and Recognition System (Professional Standards, Fellowships, and “Golden Ticket” awards - coming 2026).
How to read the EF-PEF?
Moving from left to right, the framework progresses through the following components:
• Values: The guiding principles and ethical commitments that shape how individuals behave, make decisions, and contribute to their organisation and wider society.
• Behaviours: The observable actions and conduct through which an individual expresses and enacts their underlying values.
• Event Lifecycle + Knowledge: The full span of event activity—from initial strategising through to planning, delivery, and evaluation—with legacy operating as a continuous “golden thread” throughout (Spirit of 2012, 2025), encompassing the diverse roles, practices, and processes required at each phase.
• Cross-Cutting Knowledge: The shared bodies of knowledge that apply across all phases of the Event Lifecycle, recognising that many forms of expertise underpin the entire process.
• Skills: A set of essential hard(er) and soft(er) capabilities required for effective professional practice in the events and festivals sector.
• Impacts: Drawing on the UN’s core development priorities, this category reflects the varied ways events generate value for economies, societies, communities, and environments.
• Outcomes: The tangible and intangible changes experienced by people, places, or systems as a direct or indirect result of planning and delivering an event.
Although public consultation on the EF-PEF is now closed, we continue to welcome feedback to support ongoing refinement. Please contact us if you would like to contribute further insights.
Uses for the EF-PEF
1. Organisations using the framework to plan workforce development
An event organisation can use the framework to map competencies required across the event lifecycle, identify gaps in its current workforce, and design targeted training programmes—for example, enhancing staff capability in sustainability, stakeholder engagement, or risk management ahead of a major event bid.
2. Individuals using the framework for professional development planning
Event professionals can use the framework as a self-assessment tool to benchmark their current skills, behaviours, and knowledge against recognised professional standards (CEF’s Professional Standards and Fellowships will be coming 2026), enabling them to create a personalised development plan—for instance, strengthening leadership behaviours or gaining new technical expertise in areas like logistics or accessibility.
3. Universities embedding the framework into curriculum design
Universities can draw on the framework to align modules, learning outcomes, assessments, and graduate attributes with industry-defined competencies, ensuring students develop the knowledge, skills, behaviours, and values required for modern event practice—for example, integrating lifecycle-based teaching or embedding ethical, inclusive, and sustainability-oriented behaviours into coursework.
4. Governments and policy-makers using the framework to plan regional or national competency needs
Policy-makers can use the framework to understand how to develop talent needed to support a thriving event sector, assess capability gaps in local or national workforces, and inform funding, training, and workforce strategies.
5. Industry bodies using the framework to benchmark credentials and professional recognition
Sector organisations or accreditation bodies can use the framework to develop a more consistent standard for professional recognition, fellowship pathways, and certification—ensuring that awards and career progression reflect the full spectrum of values, behaviours, skills, and outcomes expected of an event professional.
Professional role “Lenses”
Across 2026 we will be releasing a series of professional role “lenses” over the framework to highlight the key knowledge, skills, values and behaviours.
Our lenses will honour the diversity of roles across the events and festivals industry — from planners and producers to strategists and policymakers — showing how each role maps onto the framework.