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Job seminars are a hit

The lectures hardly seem designed to leave audiences howling for encores. But such seminars as "Complying with Phase Two Hazardous Waste Regulations under RCRA" and "Planning Your Drilling Program to Minimize Your Windfall Profit Tax" are packing in crowds for the Executive Enterprises, Inc. of New York. The need for businessmen and other professionals to learn more about their own fields has transformed the once sleepy world of educational seminars into a hot new growth field. Explains Long Beach, Calif., Seminar Promoter Dominick M. Shrello: "Things change so fast that people constantly need new knowledge, and seminars can adapt much faster than hard-cover books or university courses."

According to one estimate, 750,000 people flocked to business and professional seminars around the U.S. last year at a cost of $350 million--up from $92 million in 1970. Organizers range from large business and professional groups to virtual one-man bands. The National Practice Institute in Minneapolis stages legal seminars for some 5,000 lawyers a year, charging about $85 per day for sessions like "The Art of Cross Examination." On the other hand, Lawrence Schwimmer of Marin County, Calif., a consultant in human resource management, takes in about $1 million a year with seminar sessions like "Women on the Fast Track."

A growing number of seminars attempt to deal with the explosion in technological and scientific knowledge. Among the 8,128 continuing medical education courses available this year, doctors can choose such seminars as a five-day sports medicine conclave at Honolulu's Princess Kaiulani Hotel, or a three-day course in "Management of the Acute Cardiac Patient" at Chicago's not so glamorous Cook County Hospital. Colleges and universities have also entered the seminar business. At U.C.L.A. 1,800 people paid $80 each last spring to attend weeklong symposiums on molecular biology.

Business seminars are often held in relatively austere surroundings, though he costs can be $700, or even higher, or a three-day session, not including lotel and air fare. Seminars now account for 15% to 20% of the income at the ten large hotels that encircle Chicago's giant O'Hare International Airport, 15 miles from the city's downtown. The lotels offer many of the amenities of their downtown competitors but without the inner-city traffic jams.

Seminars involve long days and heavy concentration. The day frequently begins with a breakfast discussion and ends with an afterdinner session. Says Arthur Fish-elman, a vice president of human resources for Revlon, who organizes between 75 and 100 study sessions annually: "These seminars entail enormously hard work and total involvement."

The popularity of seminars has also begun spawning swank new executive retreats such as the National Conference Center in East Windsor, N.J., and Centre One in Eastlake, Ohio, near Cleveland. At Centre One, executives can unwind by playing tennis and racquetball or by soaking in a hot tub, then return to their rooms, flip on the television and watch replays of the highlights of the day's seminar sessions. The developers of Centre One are planning to start construction of a similar retreat this fall in Southington, Conn., and others are planned for Atlanta, Kansas City, Dallas, Chicago and Newport Beach, Calif.

In the past, the need for businessmen to keep abreast of Washington's ever multiplying regulations helped keep demand for seminars strong, especially in law and accounting. But in spite of the Reagan Administration's deregulation drive, seminar promoters expect that their industry will keep right on growing anyway, and they may just be right. Explains Louis Abrams of Executive Enterprises: "Out of deregulation will come a whole new set of issues and seminars."

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