A very welcoming career field

By JEFFREY STEELE , Special Advertising Sections Writer

Are you the kind of person who hates stressful moments? Do you recoil at the thought of working evening and weekends? Are you the type who’d prefer to work in a cubicle?

If you said yes to any of the above, you should have reservations about a hotel or restaurant management career.

On the other hand, if you welcome the challenge of helping people feel comfortable, don’t mind working when other people are relaxing at home and are drawn to a career field that’s comparatively recession proof, consider checking into hotel and restaurant management.

ADRENALINE JUNKIES

But, be assured: It takes a different kind of individual to work in the hospitality industry. Those who are employed in this field don’t shrink from the prospect of a hotel or restaurant that’s virtually empty one hour, but bursting with guests demanding service the next.

“The people who thrive in it are really adrenaline junkies,” said Carl Winston, director of the Hospitality and Tourism Management program at San Diego State University (SDSU) in San Diego, with a laugh.

Whether in hotel management, restaurant operations or event planning, most hospitality industry people face alternating periods of relative calm and nearly frantic activity, he said.

And, they’re not nine-to-fivers.

“We show freshmen they’ll beworking on weekends, nights and holidays the rest of their lives,” Winston said. “Here in San Diego, there are over 150,000 people who work in the hospitality industry. They go to the beach on Monday, do their shopping on Tuesday. Their friends wind up being people who themselves work in hospitality.”

Despite what some might consider career downsides, hospitality management programs are attracting increasing numbers of students. At Collins School of Hospitality Management at Cal Poly Pomona, a 32-year-old program ranked as one of the top three hospitality degree programs in the United States, the number of annual graduates has surged from 100 to 160 in four years. At San Diego State, the Hospitality and Tourism Management program has skyrocketed from 13 to 419 students since its inaugural year in 2001.

CHANCE TO TRAVEL

An attractive aspect of earning a degree in hotel and restaurant management is the enormous variety of jobs awaiting degree holders, said Jerald Chesser, dean of the Collins School of Hospitality Management. Graduates who work in hotels may take on titles of hotel manager, concierge, front desk manager, food and beverage manager or housekeeping manager or may be employed in the hotel’s sales and marketing offices. Others may work in restaurant management, catering, events planning and consulting and research firms.

“We have one [graduate] who went to work as a salesperson for Hormel, in food sales,” Chesser said, adding that the field’s job diversity helps it weather economic cycles. “When one piece ofthe industry is down, another may be up.”

A career in hospitality management also can be a way to see the country, or even the world. For instance, those who enter the management track with national chains and do well can request transfers to hotels or restaurants in other cities. Other positions that permit considerable travel include quality assurance inspectors and members of teams opening new hotels and eateries.

“One can, in five or 10 years, live in a lot of different places,” Winston said.

Chesser agreed. He recently spoke with a native of the Netherlands who works with Marriott in Los Angeles, but was part of the team that opened the first Marriott in Moscow.

BUSINESS FIRST

Business courses are important parts of the curricula at hospitality management programs. For instance, those pursuing the four-year bachelor of science degree in hospitality and tourism management at San Diego State start with 10 prerequisite business courses in such subjects as calculus, statistics, economics and law, Winston said.

“After the first couple of years, the coursework gets a lot more fun,” he added. “The students can focus on three areas: hotel operation, restaurant operation or the meetings and events industry. They take very business-oriented classes, [learning] lots of financial skills, writing skills and interpersonal skills. Students learn the soft skills, the interpersonal skills in a hotel context, hotel law context or hotel accounting context.”

Degree programs also feature practical experience. At the Collins School of Hospitality Management, for example, students take a series of food and beverage courses culminating in a course that allows them to apply their business and food knowledge in the student-run restaurant, the Restaurant at Kellogg Ranch. In addition, they are required to accumulate 800 hours of professional experience in the part of the industry in which they’re interested.

Collins School students work in country clubs, hotels, restaurants and resorts to amass those hours, Chesser said.

At the William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV), undergraduates must complete internships, accumulating 1,000 hours of work experience prior to graduation, said Gail Sammons, chairwoman of the Hotel Management Department.

In one of the program’s capstone food and beverage courses, students manage a restaurant for a day, creating the menu, preparing food, serving guests and closing the restaurant. On the hotel management side, student teams vie against teams from other hotel management schools in simulations in which they choose the property for a new hotel, build the hotel, open it to guests and then adjust their rates in response to prevailing market forces, Sammons said.

SOFT SKILLS ESSENTIAL

In addition to rigorous training, the most successful employees bring to their jobs a number of innate characteristics, including good interpersonal communication capabilities, the ability to work well in teams and the knack of being able to adapt to changes.

“Things change rapidly,” Chesser said. “When you have 1,200 conference attendees who arrive [at a hotel] in six hours, that takes a certain mentality, where one says, ‘How can we make this seamless for the guest?’ ”

The right attitude about service also is key. Those who view service as helping people and fulfilling their needs, not as servitude, are more likely to be successful, Sammons said.

Combine these attributes, and it’s likely there’s a good job waiting in hospitality, Winston said.

“When we envisioned the program, we envisioned placing 100 people a year,” he said. “And, I’m absolutely convinced I could place five times that number. There’s such a demand in the hotel, restaurant and events industries for management people who get it.”

Jeffrey Steele is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

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