Anyone interested in a career managing a resort, restaurant, hotel, club or casino needs a great hospitality management education. While there are many advancement opportunities available for people getting promoted through the ranks, you can take a smarter shortcut through getting a degree in hospitality management. This would be a wiser career move even for people already employed in this industry since professionals with a degree gain entry-level management positions.
How About a New Career?
Perhaps you’re working in a job that offers no career advancement opportunities or financial improvement. Selecting a new career in hospitality management is a wise choice because there are ample opportunities. However, you need specific skills and knowledge to become successful. Choice hospitality management schools will prepare students for several restaurant management careers as well as overseeing operations in luxury hotels, resorts and spas. Students might take courses with subject matter such as beverage, catering, marketing, sales, business management and more as part of the curriculum included in pursuit of a hospitality management degree. That degree offered through a four-year course of study can lead to a Bachelor of Science in Hospitality Management. Additionally, professionals seeking advance post-graduate study can take courses leading to a Master of Science in Hospitality Management or possibly an Executive Master of Science in Hospitality Management. If you do not want to invest this amount of time toward a degree program, many schools offered specifically focused training offering Certificate Programs for specialized management in areas of hotel, restaurant, lodging, travel and tourism.
Why Choose a Degree Program
Many prestigious schools throughout the world offer a variety of hospitality degree programs that provide students with all the knowledge needed to gain entry to a career. Furthermore, most, if not all, schools have partnership arrangements with many of the largest restaurant, hotel and resort companies in the world. Students benefit from association with these industry leading companies developing real-life skills through paid internships. Although many focused certificate-granting programs can provide students with focused-topic skill development, degree programs offer a greater depth toward acquiring a broad range of hospitality management skills that go beyond operations basics.
What is Learned?
Students enrolled in hospitality management degree courses will gain the opportunity to learn in-depth about subjects such as marketing, instead of merely learning to run a restaurant. A greater understanding is developed acquiring planning and development allowing students to learn about forecasting consumer likes and dislikes as well as predicting trends in consumer usage. Psychology education aids degreed managers in developing interpersonal management and communication skills helping develop successful contact with both customers and employees. Hospitality management is a people business. Sure, you need to know how to run a facility. However, facilities do not run by themselves. People run these. And, people use them, so a highly skilled hospitality manager who possesses great communication skills can become a great host to customers as well as a productive supervisor to employees.
Hospitality is Big Business
Vacations are at the crux of the hospitality industry followed by travel – both personal and business. This is practically the largest business in the world – taking into account all that relates to it. Therefore, many areas relating to different fields of expertise have direct and indirect effects upon the industry. Hospitality managers are the ones responsible for small and large operations. Sometimes a hospitality manager in small operations must be a “jack-of-all-trades” wearing many hats, performing many duties because of the size of the facility and budget constraints. Or, perhaps, a hospitality manager at a large resort is responsible for Guest Relations only, focusing on a single area of facility operations.
In each case, an education received through a hospitality degree program will qualify a student to handle the challenges presented by both.