Things you should know before entering the tourism industry (3) Current situation

In the last article, I summarized some mainstream tourism-related enterprises and occupations mainly according to the traditional and emerging dimensions. This paper will focus on analyzing some problems encountered in entering the tourism industry and their development bottlenecks.

From my observation of my classmates around me, I have come to a very interesting conclusion: most students majoring in tourism management have not chosen to travel, while most students who enter the tourism industry have graduated from tourism. (Not a tongue twister! ! ! )

Using mathematical thinking to understand this relationship is like this: all industries as a whole, including tourism. Tourism and job seekers majoring in tourism are two subsets, so both of them plan to engage in tourism after graduation. In this way, it is easy for everyone to understand. In fact, the number of people who really have a tourism study background and then enter the tourism industry is very limited, because the intersection is a small part.

So why did many students study hard for three or four years and didn't choose this relatively familiar industry when they graduated? Let's talk about several reasons from the current situation I have observed and the difficulties I have encountered in my work.

1. The learning content at school does not match the actual work requirements.

Taking our school as an example, tourism management is a parallel discipline with economics and business administration under the Business School. Most of our courses in the first two years are like this: advanced mathematics, probability theory and mathematical statistics, linear algebra and other mathematics courses, business courses such as marketing, economics, public relations, college English, Marx and other compulsory courses. My impression is that the only tourism-related course I took in the previous two years was Introduction to Tourism. In my junior year, I began to take professional courses, such as tourism geography, tourism planning, tourism marketing, tourism psychology, tourism English and travel agency management. It is characterized by a wide range, but it is superficial. There is no class at the beginning of the senior year, which is used for internship and graduation thesis preparation.

In my junior year, the school arranged an internship for our major. There is a five-star hotel opposite the school that has cooperated with our school for a long time, and we are all assigned to the housekeeping department and catering department of this hotel for internship. The housekeeping department's job is to clean the room, and the catering department's job is to serve food. I understand this situation. Of course, I just don't want to do this internship, and then suddenly I said that I couldn't arrange all the students to go, so I went to Shanghai to find my own internship.

I'm not saying that I can't do dirty work and suffer hardships. I'm not saying that I look down on basic work. I mean doing internship to pave the way for my future career development. I can't waste my precious months in college doing a job that has nothing to do with my future career planning.

Let me talk about my internship in Shanghai. I really wanted to do marketing at that time, but I found a job at the end of the year, so not many hotels are recruiting interns. As a result, I went to a department called Royal Service at the front desk of Shanghai Peace Hotel. Here is just a question related to subtitles: as we all know, PMS (Property Management System) is needed for hotel front desk work. The most famous ones are Opera and Fidelio, and the most wonderful system is NA, but I didn't learn any of them at school. At that time, an intern in the same department went a few months before me. He went to Shanghai Tourism College and was studied by others. The basic system is completely normal.

Then, according to my classmates' descriptions, I will talk about their internships at school: many colleagues who take them to work in their hotels are students who have just graduated from vocational colleges. They are young, but they are very skilled in their work. Because I have been studying and practicing in school, a group of college students in their early twenties in my class are all brought by "old employees" who are eighteen or nineteen years old when they work.

I hope that through these two examples, I can explain to you a problem encountered by the tourism industry at present: what I learned at school is not equal to the actual work needs. We have learned too much empty management, and each course requires us to look at the overall situation from the perspective of managers. This is theoretical, but no course specifically teaches us the basic skills we will use in specific positions, which I think is not as pragmatic as specialized vocational colleges. Of course, we study tourism management, just as those of us who get high marks are defined as future managers, but all managers must also understand the operation at the grass-roots level in order to better manage their work, and college students who have just graduated without any work experience also need to gradually upgrade from "managed" to "managed".

From this point of view, some schools' tourism management majors focus on tourism planning, and usually study many professional subjects such as landscape design, human history and tourism geography. It will be much better to do relevant social practice in the university and work in a tourism planning company after graduation, and a lot of knowledge can still be used.

Therefore, if a school's disciplines are too macro, there are both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that you can understand all aspects, but the disadvantage is that no field is professional, which is unfavorable for entering a specific industry at first.

2. The starting point of work is low, and the content is simple and boring.

This point was mentioned in the previous article. As can be seen from the above description, most newly graduated students need to start from the most basic positions. I believe most students agree with what I wrote above: We are not afraid of hardship, but some jobs are far from our career expectations. If you are only a pure labor force, why do you study so hard for so many years? We don't expect to do it in one step. We are willing to be down-to-earth, but we hope to make achievements in a position that can give full play to what we have learned and our personal abilities.

I think for most basic work, it is inevitable that the work content is simple and boring. According to Adam Smith's theory, a series of work contents should be gradually decomposed into the smallest actions, which are assigned to different people to complete respectively, so that the overall efficiency is the highest. The best proof of this theory I have encountered is that the bigger the company, the finer the division of functions, and everyone in the basic position has a clear division of labor, only doing their most skilled business and solving problems with the highest efficiency. But this does lead to another problem: the usual work may become simple repetition, very boring, and there will be a lack of understanding of other related contents, so this theory is correct in manufacturing, but it is unfavorable in human development.

Many large companies have various trainings and job rotation, in order to make potential employees develop in many ways, but this is not particularly obvious in the tourism industry. The staff development of most hotels is vertical, not horizontal. Having said that, I would like to introduce the only exception I have ever seen-my former company: club med, where you can really train in different departments, and there are many opportunities to change departments. The most outrageous thing I have ever seen is working as a sports manager in a resort and changing to HR in the headquarters.

3. Low wage level

In addition to sales jobs, the salary level of general tourism jobs will be relatively low. Although the final salary of a sales position may be high, the basic salary is low and the income fluctuates greatly. One of the main reasons is that the basic work has low technical content and strong substitutability. In addition, many of these jobs are difficult to carry out in shifts, which leads to the disgusting result of high mobility.

4. Experience-based work makes promotion difficult.

As I have said many times before, hotels are obviously experiential jobs. Let me talk about travel agencies and OTA again.

If I have to work in a travel agency, I will definitely choose to plan, design and plan tourist routes. However, most travel agencies regard relevant work experience as a required item when recruiting for this position, and some even regard the resources you have mastered in your previous work as one of the admission conditions.

So what about OTA as a relatively new tourism enterprise? From my point of view, it may give us a disappointing answer. Before interviewing booking.com, I spent two hours in English interview, including HR and team leader, two to one. Even in this two-on-one situation, I even played a role. Originally, corporate culture, wages and benefits were fine, and then naturally we talked about career planning. I said that I really hope to keep developing in the OTA field (this is true, not for interviews). This field is new to me, too, and I still have a lot to learn. Short-term planning, hoping to make achievements in the existing position. I expressed interest, but I applied for the position of trainer in the department. In the medium and long term, I hope to rotate to different departments, learn more about different business types and give full play to my expertise. Then HR also said frankly that for job rotation, although every company will have such an opportunity, it is actually more difficult, not only to meet the requirements of other departments, but also to wait for opportunities; For promotion, there are currently two colleagues working in the position of trainer. If they don't leave, there will be no extra vacancies. Although it is not what I expected, it is the answer I expected. So later I turned down HR and took the initiative to say goodbye to Amsterdam.

I think many times we are misunderstood after 90. We are looking forward to promotion and salary increase, but not everyone is impetuous, impatient and unrealistic. We just expect our abilities to be developed and recognized, and we can become dazzling on the stage that suits us. My personal requirements for the position are far greater than my salary. I hope to do the work that I like and match my ability (that is, I have just passed the qualification, which is a little difficult and I can enjoy the joy of completion). Salary is only a matter of time, but as long as I am good enough, I will be treated fairly.

5. Difficulties in self-improvement

I believe that many fresh graduates choose their first job with the mentality of reading. I often hear such words in interviews: it doesn't matter how much salary, whether you are tired or not, the most important thing is to learn something.

In fact, however, it is unrealistic to expect to learn the job skills that meet your expectations in your usual work. For example, when I first started my internship in a hotel, I needed some basic query functions of opera. Then I really want to learn how to book and use the financial module, but in fact, my department doesn't need to use these functions, and I can't go to other departments at work to see how they work at will, so it's difficult to learn the relevant skills you are interested in through my original job.

If you don't give up, you're on your own. For example, if you are interested in opera, you can buy an operation tutorial yourself and use your spare time at work to practice the operation in the book on the computer (after all, there is only opera in the office computer). A person who wants to learn can learn anyway.

Follow-up: Tourism is indeed a popular major abroad, and the quality of relevant staff is also very high. At home, it may still be in the development stage. Moreover, China is too vast and the development of different regions is very uneven, so many problems are inevitable at this stage. In these two years, there are many popular backpackers and tourists. They used their love of travel to live the life they wanted, and also helped many people to open a new world of travel. More and more foreign tourism enterprises have entered the China market. When they carve up the China market, we can learn from them in many aspects.

This industry is still making progress. If you are inside, let's work together.

The hymn wishes everyone a happy Tangyuan Festival in advance! What should I write in the next article?