May 20, 2006 - Word Forms and Macros Class

The next hands-on computer class will be Word Forms and Macros on May 20, 2006. These classes are held at Edward Hospital and are free for Two Rivers Chapter members. IAAP members from outside our chapter can attend for $25 and non-members can attend for $50. These classes have proven to be a very popular benefit of membership. We do have limited space, so sign up early! Visit the contact us page at http://www.iaap-tworivers.org/contact.shtml.

Next Brainstorming Chat - March 9, 2006

The next brainstorming online chat has been arranged for March 9, 2006 at 12:00 central time. This will provide an awesome opportunity for IAAP chapters across the world to participate in exchanging ideas with their fellow chapters. The topic of this chat will be Generating Positive Publicity for your chapter.

All IAAP members (not just officers) are welcome to join this chat.

March Meeting Promises to Be "Memorable"!

Our March 13, 2006 meeting is rapidly approaching with speaker Doug Crowe showing us "You Have a Perfect Memory... Strategies to Increase Your Memory 500%." This promises to be an evening of useful tips that will benefit you no matter what you are doing in life!

We'll have a special door prize of two copies of Microsoft Office on that evening. We also expect to be announcing who our 100th member is!!! (Keeping our fingers crossed!)

In addition, the evening will be extra special because we'll be having our guests: several students from College of DuPage who are coming to learn about the value of a professional association.

It's sure to be a memorable evening and you won't want to miss it!

PowerPoint Class Full!

Our PowerPoint class scheduled for Feb. 25 is full! We only have 28 computers and every spot is filled (plus a few, so we'll bring in an extra laptop or two). We are happy that so many of our members are taking advantage of this training opportunity. You can still sign up and be added to a waiting list, since we may get some cancellations. Also, if enough additional people are on the waiting list, we may look at adding a second class.

Terrific First Networking Luncheon

Thirteen individuals broke bread together at Connie's Pizza on February 7 during our first members only networking luncheon. This gave us an opportunity to learn more about each other with a more leisurely time for talking than our meetings allow. It was a great success and we plan on hosting these events in the future.

What a great February meeting!

Fifty administrative professionals gathered together to learn about the Sarbanes Oxley law and what impact (if any) it held on our jobs. This rather dry topic was given a fresh discussion by Roger Herdrich of M&R Printing with a lot of audience interaction and questions.

We received some unfortunate news that our special guests, the students from College of DuPage would have to wait until our March meeting, as their instructor had been hospitalized for a brief period of time. We are so happy to hear that she is on the road to recovery and we look forward to seeing her next month.

All the attendees at our February meeting were in a drawing for a copy of Microsoft Office, which was donated by Microsoft. There are so many reasons to attend our meetings, but this certainly added an element of excitement to the evening, especially when it was announced that we would be giving TWO copies away as door prizes at our March meeting and TWENTY copies away as door prizes at our April 25, 2006 Administrative Professionals Week Event.

We were not able to announce who our 100th member was, because the January report reflected a very dramatic 99 members! We are nonetheless very excited to have arrived at this milestone and since three individuals turned in their membership applications last night, we are certain this will be the month that we take the amazing step of moving into 3 digit membership.

APW Event is coming together!

The Administrative Professionals Week event, "Cruise to Success" is coming together! As posted previously (http://iaap-tworivers.blogspot.com/2006/01/laying-ground-work-for-fantastic.html), we already have Corner Bakery providing a wonderful dinner and we have Dr. Lucia Murphy, a motivational speaker, presenting the topic "Leaving Your Footprints in the Sands of Time". In addition, one of our members has stepped forward to offer her company's beautiful auditorium and a large conference room to accommodate our group. While we will still be capped at 100 attendees, we'll have the opportunity to bring in more vendors for the Vendor Expo.

Each of those vendors will be requested to provide a nice door prize. We already have commitments for multiple copies of Microsoft Office as door prizes and assorted office toys for each attendee, plus demo CDs. Super Suppers will be exhibiting and they have donated a certificate for cooking six entrees at their facility. Productivity Point has signed on and plans to donate a certificate for a free class. The Holiday Inn is providing a weekend getaway for two including the Saturday night Prime Rib Buffet dinner and Sunday brunch for two. We are also in discussion with several more vendors and expect this to be a top notch expo!

The entire evening is free, but because we do expect to "sell out", we strongly encourage you to RSVP early if you want to come. We'll be giving our members a few days notice before we start allowing guests, but once those few days have passed, it's first come, first served!

Awesome Job Search Bootcamp

What a wonderful job search bootcamp we had this past Saturday. Almost 40 attendees braved the dreary wet January morning to attend our fantastic sessions. The first speaker, Sally Morrison of LDS Services and the Naperville Career Center, walked us through the steps of preparing a cover letter that gets you noticed. There were numerous requests for her handouts, which will be posted on our links page. Sally was followed by Paul Shanahan and Mike Flickinger of Randstad teaching us How to Handle Tough Interview Questions. The audience decided this topic had enough meat that we could have made it three hours long and still not covered everything we wanted to! The final speaker was Jeff Korhan of True Nature who provided us some insight on determining our career path in life. We received excellent feedback from all the participants on these fine speakers.

Following our seminars, we held a vendor exhibit area, which gave our attendees the opportunity to learn about the various resources in Naperville for job seekers. Our thanks to Directions Training, the Illinois Education and Training Center (it was great to see our June 2005 speaker again Richard Oberbruner!), the Naperville Career Center, the Naperville Public Library, OfficeTeam, Randstad, Robert Morris College, St. Thomas the Apostle Job Club, and True Nature.

Finally, we thank Gwen Ray of Packer Engineering and Paul Shanahan, Mike Flickinger and Jessica Masterson of Randstad for providing free resume reviews for our attendees. More than twenty individuals took advantage of the chance to receive an HR individual's opinion of their resume.

We really enjoyed this seminar and we hope to be able to offer it or something similar in the future.