About the CMP and the CMM

Today's financial services and insurance meeting planners have entered the profession from a host of different directions. Laurie Fitzgerald, CMP, meeting manager at Northbrook, Ill. — based Allstate Financial, for example, majored in Spanish in college. “I started in human resources at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago in 1983 because they were looking for people who spoke Spanish,” she says. Others got into the field from such diverse degrees or beginning job experiences as marketing and