5 Essential Skills for Careers in Hospitality Industry

Hospitality industry is full of opportunities for many people with social skills, professional knowledge, and with vital organizational skills. The hospitality industry includes five major sectors: food service, lodging, recreation, tourism, and travel. All these sectors are requiring you to have certain skills. Hospitality jobs are one of the most competitive industries in the world. To successfully hold a job you will need to have skills that are searched by employers and customers. Whether you are preparing for an interview or about to start your career in this industry it is important to know the top 6 skills you will need for your job.

Commitment in Hospitality Industry
You must be committed to ensure quality service delivery to your customer. Your main enemy here is the selfish attitude that will only work against your success in this industry. You must be committed to surpass customer expectations for you to gain more business and satisfy the existing customers who you already have. Doing this is not so much an easy task but it is something that will give you great rewards in the long run.

Interpersonal Skills Hospitality Industry
Excellent customer service is important in the hospitality industry because of regular interaction with customers. One way of providing superior customer service is having good interpersonal management skills. Interpersonal skills are essential to perform well in this industry because of their association with some specific factors. A Hotel Management course trains individuals on how to use good interpersonal skills while dealing with people and helps them perform outstanding jobs in the right place.

Problem-solving
A crucial skill you need as a hotel manager is problem-solving. It’s what makes managers successful business owners and leaders instead of labourers, and it’s also something they instil in new staff. Effective problem instigators don’t always give you answers; instead, they ask questions and can identify multiple variables and resort to trial and error to achieve the best solutions. They know how to adjust the plan based on what works and doesn’t work. If things change, they don’t see that as an excuse to stop trying; they see it as an opportunity to try something else.

Careers in the Horse Racing Industry

We can’t all be Frankie Dettori or Rachael Blackmore, but there are many different roles in the racing industry including becoming a jockey, of course, that could be a realistic goal and end up in a thoroughly gratifying and inspiring career.

Why horse racing?
The horse racing industry supports over 85,000 jobs in the UK and is the nation’s 2nd largest spectator sport after football, but the nation’s largest sporting employer. It also attracts 5 million people to the country’s many racecourses each year. There are a wide variety of roles associated with the industry across a huge array of organisations and the industry is vibrant, diverse, exciting and fast-paced, providing employment opportunities galore. Whether you would like to get involved in events management, training, veterinary care, looking after racehorses, jockeying or behind the scenes work the industry can provide wonderful career opportunities.

Apprenticeship
A variety of organisations offer apprenticeships, including the National Horseracing College, The National Stud and The British Racing School. Details of the latter are given as an example below.

The British Racing School delivers an excellent apprenticeship in Racehorse Care nationwide. The Foundation Apprenticeship is free and guarantees successful candidates a job in racing. It is compulsory for anyone under the age of 19 seeking to enter the racing industry. The course includes:

A residential Foundation Course
A work placement in a racing yard
Key skills development
In terms of duration it is 9-12 weeks and on successful completion of studies the apprenticeship itself takes around 1 year to achieve, during which you will be placed in a yard and assessed on your work.

Online resources
Careersinracing.com is managed by the British Horseracing Authority and is a superb place for information on careers in the racing industry. There are recruitment initiatives and marketing campaigns promoting careers in racing as well as advertised pathways for those seeking to get into a career in racing. They also have a ‘jobs board’ which processes in excess of 1000 hobs every year!

Specific careers in racing
The racing world is such that there are a huge range of potential careers that are associated with the sport including but not limited to:

Riding and jockeying

Grooming
Training
Handling
Stewarding
Marketing
Journalism
Event Managing
Agenting
Ground-staffing
Obviously, the route into some of these (like marketing, journalism and event management) might see you come from an institution not affiliated with the racing industry. Some of these careers, however, have paths unique to the sport. Let’s look at a couple of notable examples.

Stud Groom
This role involves looking after the horses, including feeding, exercising and liaising with vets and farriers. You will be involved in attending to mares and foals during and after foaling and maintaining stud records, to name but a few of your many duties.

Work Rider
This role involves exercising and schooling racehorses to get them to race fitness. The skill level here is high and the role involves gauging a horse’s fitness and agility levels as well as their preferred ground. Pay depends on experience and it is a very satisfying role to get involved in.

Cool UX Careers You Should Consider

UX Design And Its Relevance
User Experience (UX), as the term, suggests it is the experience a user goes through when they visit a website or an application. The style in which your website interacts with users, time to load pages and the efficiency of the website are all factors in it. A website with very high performance but low UX means the users will not choose it. The website should be beautiful and interactive with the user. The overall experience should be excellent and enriching. From how easily you can find the required option to how smoothly you can navigate through pages plays a vital role.

UX Design has a lot of relevance now. There are UI UX design services exclusively for the user experience part. With many applications and websites available for the same service, what makes one unique is how beautifully and efficiently it is designed. It takes only a few seconds for a user to leave the website and find another one; this shows the prominence of UX design. If the experience is enriching, the user will come back again to your website or application. So it is high time you start giving more attention to the design part of your website. Another critical factor is to make sure the website works fine on both mobile and desktop. With the increasing number of smartphone users if the website is not compatible with mobiles, then it is a defect.

Career Options in UX Field
With the User Experience getting a lot of prominences, UX career options are promising. There are many roles in the UX field, let us look into some of them.

UX Designer
The UX designer plays the role of communicating with the client and developing the user design. They have to convey the design idea to the client effectively. It is not an easy task as most of the time; the clients will be from non-technical backgrounds, so the designer will have to break down all the technical jargons. As a designer, you will have to participate in the research, analysis, development, and testing phases.

Interaction Designer
As the name suggests, interaction designers have to think from the user perspective. They have to create engaging interfaces with the user’s behaviour in mind. With the information available, they have to understand how the user will interact with the technology and what they expect from the website. They have to anticipate the way users will communicate with the system and find solutions for that and then make innovative ideas. They are the primary designer of the operational components.

Usability Analyst
The Usability Analyst has to make out what the user experiences from your website as they interact with it. You have to interact with the website and see how well it functions and how efficient it is. You have to go through the user’s experience and find solutions on making it more enriching and pleasant. These findings will back up the design process.

Visual Designer
A Visual Designer does the graphical user interface of the website or application. They decide the style, images, and colours to be used depending on the products or service. So in a way, they are responsible for what we see the style and the way it is aligned. It is the Visual Designer’s job to make sure the design, colours and image fit in seamlessly with the website and does not stand out.

User Researcher
The role of User Researcher is to understand the user requirements, what they want, and how to keep them engaged throughout the website. They will also have to conduct analysis on the user’s behaviour and find solutions to improve the user experience. From this research, they can give useful feedback on the design part.

Information Architect
The Information Architect structures the content of the website. They make sure the users get comfortable with the content. Make sure the language is understandable and straightforward. They create a proper structure to the content. The content depends on the type of product or service the website is providing

Why choose UX Careers?
UX Careers are one of the most promising fields today. The opportunities are growing tremendously. With the design part becoming more and more prominent and with the inflow of more apps, this field is going to be a high potential one. So it is the right time to start a career in the UX field. You can work with a UX consultant or do freelance work or work with companies. In the above section, we have already discussed the job opportunities available in the area. Some of the benefits are:

In high demand and promising growth opportunities
The emergence of Design-Centric Companies
High Job Satisfaction
Highly Rewarding
You can stay creative and innovative
The Skills a UX Professional Should have
There are some necessary skills a UX professional should have. Let us look into some of the technical abilities despite the role they are playing the UX field.

XML, HTML, CSS Coding
Image Editing
Front-end programming
Project Management
Writing and Editing Skills
Testing Skills
Search Engine Optimization
Other than these technical skills, there are some other skills too that a UX professional should have or if not develop.

Think from the user’s perspective
Follow the latest design trends
Communication Skills to interact with the client
Analysis and Testing Skills
Write engaging content in simple language
Create a design that interacts with the user
Final Thoughts
The UX Design is of very high importance these days. The career options are also vast. If you have design skills, it is the best time to start your UX journey. The companies are giving more prominence to the design part, and the trends keep on evolving. So it is vital to keep yourself updated with them.

To give the users an enriching experience, to make them stay on the website ad utilise the products are the primary tasks a designer has to do. It is not a difficult one as we all visit websites and so we know what we expect from them. Always keep the design simple and make the content engaging.