The hospitality industry is a broad category of fields within the field of service, which includes bars and restaurants, conference and events, amusement parks, hotels, transportation, travel, and many more. It takes a lot more than just academic training to thrive to success in the field of hospitality. What does it take to make it to the top in the hospitality sector? Here is a list of the top 5 skills that employers look for in an ideal candidate. Make sure you’ve acquired these skills and highlight them in your job applications and during interviews!
Building and managing relationships
The level of success in the hospitality industry highly depend on a person’s ability to establish and maintain long-term relationships, especially with customers, guests, vendors, and also with other employees. After all, hospitality industry is all about satisfying customers by providing quality service.
Having the ability to make friends and maintain relationships is essential for anyone who wish to pursue a long-lasting career in the hospitality sector. When great relationships are established, any customer could become a return customer, and nourishing the relationships you’ve built is vital to long term success.
Multitasking
Working in the hospitality industry, you face all kinds of situations everyday. It requires hospitality professionals to handle multiple responsibilities smoothly and simultaneously. For example, if you work in the hotel management industry, you may need to handle rat problems in the thermostat pipe, sooth a dissatisfied guest, while greeting new customer with a cheerful smile, all in the course of one morning.
You need to keep calm and handle everything in a timely fashion. After all, you are the one whom people expect to take things under control. To succeed in the hospitality industry, you need to be able to multitask, to handle the fast paced work environment and complicated work responsibilities.
Attention to details
In the service industry, it is the little things that make a difference. It is the little things that make a guest’s experience truly extraordinary. In order to reach the highest customer satisfaction, you need to ensure your services are ‘premium’ and personal. With this comes attention to detail.
To excel at creating that extraordinary experience, you need to make sure everything is attended to, from serving the freshest flowers to making sure the name tags for each guest is printed and placed correctly. A successful hospitality professional must be excellent at addressing each detail.
Interpersonal skills
Interpersonal skills, also known as soft skills, are curtail for all occupations in the hospitality industry. To be successful in hospitality, you must have top notch interpersonal skills, as the very nature of this industry is to provide spectacular customer service. A smile, and a warm-hearted greeting can go a long way. Your academic training or past work experience may open the door to a new career in hospitality. It is your interpersonal skills that will make you thrive amongst all your customers and coworkers, and eventually bring your success and profit in the long run.
Being able to make other people feel welcomed and at ease is the key to success in a customer facing role. Knowing how to greet people properly, how to make friends and host soothing conversations will help you work harmoniously with your customers as well as coworkers.
Communication skills
The most successful ones in the hospitality business are those with excellent communication skills. Being able to communicate effectively both orally and in writing will help you solve a lot of problems. Exceptional communication skill is in high demand in most industries, but it is particularly significant and most important to have when working in the hospitality field.
With a hospitality career, you face a wide range of customers every day, and provide services to all kinds of people with all sorts of needs. You need to know how to communicate with people from a variety of backgrounds, ages, nationalities and cultures. It is therefore important that you are able to convey yourself in such a manner that represents the business you are in while speaking to customers in a manner that they can relate with.
As the largest career college in Canada with 50 campuses across the country, Academy of Learning College attributes the growth in our success to identifying the gap between the formal education available and the realities of the working world. We fulfill the needs of learners by developing customized programs for each student, while meeting the requirements for convenient and effective training at an affordable cost. Browse our program list by province and find the best program that suits your needs!