This year's European Mentoring & Coaching Conference - the largest ever - is to be held for the first time outside the UK.

The event, which takes place in Brussels on November 18 and 19, will feature one of Europe's best-known authorities on mentoring, David Clutterbuck, who joins visiting professor of HRD at Sheffield Hallam University, David Megginson, for the conference's first plenary session.

They will explore how to move beyond programmes of coaching and mentoring within an organisation to a systems approach which puts development at the heart of day to day management and leadership.

The second plenary session will be taken by Professor Kathy E Kram of Boston University School of Management, who will examine how mentoring has changed over the past 20 years and look forward to possible future developments.

Other speakers at the conference hail from companies such as Siemens, Johnson and Johnson, Lloyds TSB, Hilton International, Ernst & Young and the Union Bank of Switzerland.

The conference's international credentials are underlined still further by a line-up of speakers from Turkey, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, Germany, Denmark, Australia, Switzerland, France and the Netherlands.

EMCC board member Eric Parsloe explained that the decision to hold the conference in Brussels followed the Council's expansion into mainland Europe.

"This has been a landmark year for the EMCC, with new branches forming in Spain and Switzerland and several others on the way to official recognition," he said. "The coaching and mentoring industry itself is growing and coming of age, and we felt that holding our conference in Brussels would underscore the increasing international maturity of our profession."

For more information on the conference see the EMCC website.