At Robinson’s mall last weekend, Foundation University was host to a set of activities in the form of competitions that they named the “Digital Exposition”. This was one of the featured non-digital activities.
The idea here was to see which of the contestant teams could better perform bartending, food service, and suitcase management in an imaginary hotel setting, keeping smiles on their faces for their “guests” all the while.
The students involved here are HRM trainees at the university, learning to become future hotel and restaurant managers. Here, they are learning to perform the skills that they will later supervise in their employees. After all, you have to know what the job is before you can tell others how to do it.
Training managers for retail establishments with direct customer contact such as hotels, restaurants, supermarkets and department stores is very important to the smooth running of these establishments, and the necessary skills are often absent- as anyone who lives here knows from experience.
Retail managers here often have very little experience or training. They are often relatives of the owners, and are simply assigned by their families to manage a store, or a restaurant, or even a hotel, while knowing little about the business they are supposed to run.
And if the managers know little, their employees often know nothing. Salespeople in local department stores are legendary for their ignorance of their own stock and its description. If an item you ask for is not immediately to hand, the salesperson will automatically say “No stock, sir” -although the item in question is sitting out in plain sight in the next aisle.
Technical questions about products are answered even more amusingly: Customer: “You have two different models of this brand of TV set- what is the difference between them?”
Salesperson: (blank look- then a smile) “This one is more expensive, sir!”
If this is true in department stores, how much more discouraging for customers in hotels and restaurants? They just don’t come back again. Stores lose customers, hotels lose guests, outsiders and tourists avoid the town in the future. Everybody loses.
Any business making direct contact with customers is not a job for untrained idiots. All the way down the line, professionals are needed- people who know their jobs and who are paid well enough to want to keep them. That’s what these students hope to achieve in the end.
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Author’s email: john.stevenson299@gmail.com
