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Professional Development for Your Hotel Employees

It can be tempting to roll out the same program for all employees when it’s time for professional development, but the easy way is not always the best course of action for your company. Finding ways to challenge and enrich employees is a tall order, but it’s one that you can be forthright in if you do the right type of planning.

GEM’s mission is to bring you the best advice for you and your team. We rounded up our three favorite professional development resources for hotel employees.

1. Offer education

People are always open to getting more education, and done correctly this can be very popular given its ramifications for careers young and old.

Harvard University professionals say that these programs can be useful because they can push folks into career advancement opportunities. Credentials that can lay permanently on a resume would be especially attractive to those who are in entry-level or middle-manager jobs. There is also an opportunity to help the people who do menial jobs since they may want to change their jobs later.

A degree or a simple certification could go a long way toward helping them do that, and it will curry favor among the employees too. That’s the case whether they leave or stay longer. No one can take that distinction away once an employee has it, and you want them to associate you with the opportunity.

2. Gauge the current skills of your workforce

Keeping good talent around in a goal of a solid and healthy business, and providing opportunities for people who you deem to be among your best is a good way to use those resources.

If people feel stagnant, they are absolutely prone to leave for greener pastures elsewhere. You would like to be able to offer things that might entice them to stick around, and the way to do that is to personalize what they might be interested in.

Someone who has been with your company for a year might have very different goals than a mid-career professional, and both would be different from someone who plans on retiring the next year. Use that information to make a decision about how to best enrich the employees who care at least in an immediate sense about advancing their careers.

3. Ask employees what they might want

One surefire way to figure out what employees want is to ask them. You should not be paying for programs that are outside the scope of your business, but you absolutely can figure out how to marry company goals with the goals of your employees.

Too often, managers are much too cavalier about what they offer in these circumstances, and they do that to the potential detriment of their organization. There’s no shame in making a bottom-up decision where your employer is concerned, especially since what you’re doing would directly impact the people that you are looking forward to keeping in and around your hotel.

Talking to employees about this is also smart since it may help tease some unresolved issue that you don’t know about. You need to know if office morale is low, or if the staff has not taken well to a a decision that you made recently.