The hospitality industry is growing at a rapid rate and offering lucrative career opportunities for the students, says Dr Koel Mitra
Students often reach that phase in life, where they have to take informed decisions about their careers. Many students these days keep asking about career choices with a specific skill-set: Students who are reasonably good in communication, have good people-skills, can work for long-hours, want to take up an industry-ready, employable job; but are not willing to take up regular engineering courses or general degree courses; what should their options be. Their skills match perfectly with a career in the Hospitality Industry; specifically in Hotel and Tourism Management.
If students have what it takes to be a part of the glamorous profession of the hospitality industry, then it’s about the right time that one can start their journey towards their dreams. Travel and Tourism in India is the largest service sector which currently employs approximately 49 million people including skilled and semi-skilled workers and the demand for workforce is expected to increase to approximately 58 million by 2020.
There still exists a wide gap in the hospitality job market which is yet to be filled and the Hospitality & Tourism industry still struggles to meet its demand for skilled manpower.
The growing numbers of domestic and international tourists pouring in every year has increased the demand for world class hotels, restaurants, and excursion sites. The competition at its height, leaves no scope for overlooking the growing demands for better facilities for our guests; hence the hospitality industry attempts to deliver quality and warmth through its services.
The Federation of Hotel & Restaurant Associations of India, commonly known as the FHRAI, is the apex body of the four regional associations representing the Hospitality Industry. FHRAI works as a direct interface between the hospitality industry, academics, international associations and other stake holders. Recently, on April 4, 2019, FHRAI, under the direction of NCHMCT has opened a central placement cell, where they pledge to place potential and successful candidates across different domains in the hospitality industry. This clearly shows that the job market in the hospitality sector are gradually getting bigger, more organised, centralised and made effective in such a manner so that any candidate who has been properly trained will not find it difficult to get a job, after the successful completion of his/her course. In fact, standardisation of the job market has made it clear that the hospitality industry is in its bloom like never before.
Hotel Management, itself describes the capacity of managing a hotel; but to choose hotel management as a career is challenging and one should be ideally prepared to understand the nuances of taking up this career as a full-time profession. A hotel management graduate ideally begins as a trainee at a hotel in which he/she should be ready to do all kinds of basic works across departments, to get the knowledge about supervisory and managerial level skills and techniques.
There are four major functional departments and six other operative departments in a hotel. The four major departments are: Front Office, Housekeeping, Food & Beverages Service, Food & Beverages Production.
The other operative departments running in a hotel are: human resources, engineering, sales, marketing, finance, information technology and others.
Hotel Management jobs incorporate numerous abilities like food and beverage service, front office operations, sales and promoting, bookkeeping and accounting and so forth. Numerous hospitality administration schools and private establishments in India offer certificate, diploma or degree courses in hotel management.
The writer is Associate Professor, Heritage Institute of Hotel Managment, Agra