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KAREN KOHLER
Tourism Research Manager, kkohler@iafrica.com
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Training The Trained
Our tourism business needs a framework of skills that is constantly revised and upgraded. It is not enough just to hire people with the ‘right’ qualifications – you have to make sure they refresh those skills and attain new ones to help your business stay ahead of the game.
Think about it. An engineering firm, for example, requires the skills of professionally qualified engineers, people who have formal training and not just the basics, to enable them to build bridges that don’t collapse, or automobile parts that don’t come apart. This education and training, together with their experience, enables them to make informed decisions for the very best results. Would you really go to a non-professionally trained doctor? Or dentist?I think not.
In the same way, your tourism business, if it is to succeed, grow and flourish, requires trained professional staff, and that naturally includes you.
If you are to have the competitive advantage over your rivals, one of the most important factors is for you to ensure that everyone concerned in running your business has both the training and the attitude to enable them to do the best possible job. Hiring just anyone is a recipe for disaster. Equally, starting up a business without the requisite training under your belt is a great way to ensure failure.
There are several highly regarded institutions across the country which produce exactly the calibre of employees your tourism business requires. Make sure you do your homework and find out what your nearest hotel school, university of technology or fully registered tourism training institution offers by way of qualifications for your particular business. Then, after ensuring that your applicant has the requisite formal qualifications, undertake interviews to find the attitude you require from a candidate. After all, it just is not enough for an employee to be qualified. They also have to have that hospitable manner, that welcoming smile, especially coupled with that ‘yes, of course I will’ attitude, that will make your clients feel welcome and also keep them delighted.
That’s not the end of the training story, though, rather it’s merely the beginning. All skills have a tendency to become rusty if they are not constantly assessed and upgraded. Certain skills go out of date. Just as a guest house’s décor can become tired, or a tourist guide’s patter become simply repetitive, hospitality skills need frequent polishing. In-house training is one of the ways of avoiding this pitfall.
Often it is the tourism business owner or manager who is best placed to carry out in-house training as they are at the cutting edge of the business every day. They are also the people who could identify the courses their employees – or themselves – require in order to make their business flourish.
An option for identifying the areas which need work is something called the ‘mystery shopper’. An unknown person is used to eat at your restaurant, stay in your B&B or take your tour. Afterwards, they provide you with an assessment of the entire experience to point out what needs improvement. It could just be that the pillows weren’t comfortable or that the food was luke warm, but it could also be that the receptionist was surly, the waiter had dirty fingernails, no one helped with the suitcases, mistakes were made with the bill, or the driver wasn’t professionally dressed.
While lazing by the swimming pool of a hotel I stayed at recently, I had to get up and walk to the bar area to order tea – no one came to offer it to me. And then I waited. And waited. My order had been completely forgotten. I had been completely forgotten. It will be a long time before I return to that hotel.
A large part of tourism is really about change and about not keeping up with change, but keeping ahead of it. Training is never ending, if for this reason alone. After all, it’s your business, and it deserves the very best.
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