The School of Hotel and Business Operations is designed to provide you information expand your knowledge in running your hotel and its business operations. The training content of the School seeks to help you understand the operational nature of business and use that knowledge to help run your hotel effectively.
Talent Management
Talent management focuses on recruiting, hiring, developing, and retaining the right talent to drive an organization’s performance. The courses in this learning track outline key activities associated with talent management and describes the roles played by managers in implementing a talent management strategy.
Ensuring Onboarding Success
Managers are key to ensuring the success of employee onboarding programs. This course provides managers with an insight into their unique role and outlines the benefits they reap from properly onboarding new hires. It also covers the key elements of an effective onboarding program and explains how onboarding is different from traditional orientation. A successful onboarding program can increase employee acclimation and productivity as well as greatly decrease employee turnover, as new employees feel engaged and motivated in their new roles.
Hitting the Recruitment Bull’s-Eye
One of the most significant challenges facing organizations is finding qualified employees. This course covers how to attract the talent needed to meet your organization’s needs, and the recruiting techniques to use to make this happen. You will learn how to consider the needs of the organization as well as the needs of the potential employees. You’ll also learn how to appeal to recruits by tapping into what is important to them in a job. The course also prepares you to establish and implement a recruitment strategy.
Applicant Screening: The First Step in Hiring the Best
Finding the right person for the job takes a lot of work, and much of this work is done prior to the actual interview. This course covers how create a job description, which will help you evaluate applicants’ resumés effectively. You’ll learn key techniques for screening resumés based on job requirements, as well as how to identify red flag issues in resumés and how to deal with them. These techniques will take you one step closer to hiring the best people.
Conducting an Effective Hiring Interview
The process of interviewing candidates to fill a role can be daunting. How do you know who to recruit? An effective interview is key to hiring the interviewee who best fits the job description. Certain steps must be taken to ensure the interviewer handles the interview well. In this course, you’ll learn how to prepare, conduct, and assess an interview to hire the right person for the right role.
Managing Your Company’s Talent
Talent management focuses on recruiting, hiring, developing, and retaining the right talent to drive an organization’s performance. This course covers why effectively managing talent is so important and how to plan for talent management. In addition, this course identifies the key activities associated with talent management and describes the roles played by managers in implementing a talent management strategy.
Planning an Effective Performance Appraisal
Few tasks make managers more uncomfortable than conducting performance appraisals – especially when an employee has a performance problem. It doesn’t have to be this way. Difficult conversations, and even terminations, can often be avoided with some effective planning to establish goals, competencies, and performance requirements. Appraisals assist with managing performance, as they encourage employees to perform their jobs well because they’re addressing the highest priority responsibilities and operating in a way that the organization expects.
Business Planning and Execution
Business execution is the “how” of getting things done. Leaders must be skilled in driving performance in the right direction through business execution. In these courses, learn about the characteristics of business execution and techniques for fostering a business execution culture. And, learn about the elements needed to execute your business strategy.
Key Elements of Business Execution
Business execution is the “how” of getting things done. As a leader, you must be skilled in driving performance and strategy in the right direction through business execution. In this course, you’ll learn about the characteristics of business execution cultures. You’ll also learn techniques for fostering a business execution culture. Finally, you’ll learn about the three elements needed to execute your business strategy: planning, people, and practice.
Aligning Unit Goals and Imperatives
Getting your priorities straight, no matter what your role is in your organization, is about keeping a focus on your goals. It requires you to think about the bigger picture, to ensure your department’s work effectively supports the vision and strategic objectives of your organization. In this course, you’ll learn about the importance of setting strategic, tactical, and operational goals to meet an organizational vision. You’ll also learn how to create effective unit goals and align them with your company’s goals and strategy. Finally, you’ll learn how to identify imperatives for action that keep you focused on meeting your objectives.
Preparing and Implementing a Business Plan
Creating a business plan helps you clearly see the opportunities and obstacles you’ll inevitably face as you pursue your business idea. By implementing a business plan, you stand a better chance of getting the support you need to succeed. In this course, you’ll learn about what a business plan is, the business planning process, and the steps you need to take when creating a business case. You’ll also learn how to carry out an internal analysis and about the key elements examined in any external and SWOT analyses. Finally, you’ll learn about activities that can help you when implementing a business case, including developing action plans and determining how the implementation should be measured, monitored, and assessed.
Creating a Successful Business Execution Culture
Leaders must execute the strategies they help create. Without execution, a strategy is just an idea. In this course, you’ll learn how to build and lead an execution culture that empowers employees to translate strategy into action.
Risk Assessment and Management
Risk, and effectively managing it, is a part of the job of anyone running a business. It is important that you mitigate or avoid the potential impact of a risk if it comes to pass and to ensure the long-term survival of your organization. In these courses, learn techniques for assessing risk that can help you identify risks and calculate the probability that they will occur.
Identifying Risks in Your Organization
Risk is an inevitable aspect of any business. As a manager, it’s important that you mitigate or avoid the potential impact of a risk if it comes to pass, to ensure the long-term survival of your organization. This course focuses on the first step in managing risk, identifying risks to your organization. You’ll explore the difference between internal and external risks, and how some risks may actually present a strategic opportunity. You’ll also learn how to use some techniques that can help you identify risks and calculate the probability that they will occur, including root cause identification, the Delphi technique, and brainstorming sessions.
Assessing Your Organization’s Risks
Risk is a fact of life for businesses and one that will never just go away. But before you can start managing risk, you need to be able to assess a risk – as well as its probability – in order to create a strategic plan that will enable you to avoid or mitigate its potential negative impact. In this course, you’ll learn some common techniques for assessing risk, including opportunity assessment, and threat assessment using FMEA – failure mode and effects analysis.
Responding Effectively to Risks
The third step to take when managing risk, once you’ve identified and assessed risks to your organization, is to deal with them appropriately. Some risks may have a higher probability of becoming a reality than others, while others may have more of a negative impact. You’ll need to treat each of these types of risks differently. This course covers how to create an effective strategy for responding to risk, such as risk exposure adjustment and contingency planning. It also outlines specific strategic plans for dealing with a risk that may be a threat or an opportunity.
Operational Improvement / Excellence
Working for excellence provides a chance to improve your hotel’s efficiency and can provide your hotel a competitive advantage. In these courses, learn tools you can use to improve operations and explore strategies that can help make your hotel more efficient and sustainable over the long term. Discover how this all can help drive hotel performance.
Managing for Operational Excellence
By achieving operational excellence, a company can not only drastically improve the quality and efficiency of its internal processes, but it can also gain a competitive advantage. But to attain operational excellence, you’ll need to understand how your organization’s existing processes work and create a plan to fundamentally enhance them. In this course, you’ll learn about Lean tools you can use to improve operations management in your organization. You’ll also explore strategies that can help make your organizational operations more efficient and sustainable over the long term.
Enabling Business Process Improvement
Process improvements can transform a business, increasing efficiency, product quality customer satisfaction, and profits. But to carry out these process improvements, you must understand the existing process design, and implement a process control system to maintain the standards of the new process. This course will cover how you can combine 6σ and Lean Six Sigma strategies to manage a business process improvement initiative so it yields the best possible results. You’ll explore how to get buy-in from stakeholders, and how to analyze and redesign a process. You’ll also learn guidelines for successfully implementing and sustaining process improvements.
Developing Your Business Acumen
Business acumen is a difficult to define combination of forethought, creativity, and agility that is a key factor in setting successful business professionals apart from their less accomplished peers. But it doesn’t just come from experience. It has to be cultivated and nurtured. In this course, you’ll learn how developing professional acumen enhances your leadership, communication, and decision-making skills. And further, you’ll learn that influences your company’s competitive advantage and explore methods for developing an operational perspective to uncover opportunities for change or innovation.
Gaining Insight through Organizational Awareness
The best leaders have a clear picture of their organizations’ people and systems, and what drives them in their chosen career. Effective leaders are also aware of each employee’s career plan, their motivations, how they interact with one another, as well as the power dynamics between staff members. In this course, you’ll learn about organizational awareness and how it relates to career management. You’ll also explore how you can develop organizational awareness when managing your career to advance your professional goals.
Strategic Thinking
Strategic thinking stretches beyond the short term and considers how an organization can succeed in the long term. By thinking strategically about a problem, you can elevate your own perspective and get a better idea of the forces at play within your organization. These courses describes what it takes to design, plan, and implement an effective strategy.
Thinking Strategically as a Manager
To resolve many of the threats and challenges that your organization will likely have to face, it’s essential that you develop a business strategy that incorporates a clear vision, new ideas, and innovative solutions. This course explores the characteristics of strategic thinking, as well as the traits you need to plan and implement an effective strategy. It also covers how to develop your capacity for thinking strategically through creative thinking, being prepared to deal with complexity, and being aware of what’s going on inside and outside your organization.
Using Strategic Thinking to Consider the Big Picture
Big-picture thinking stretches beyond the short term and considers how an organization can succeed in the long term. By thinking strategically about a problem using the bigger picture, you can elevate your perspective and get a better idea of the forces at play within your organization. This course describes how systems thinking can help you become skillful at making sense out of opposites and contradictions and better understand cause and effect while managing your department according to the business strategy. It explains actions you can take to encourage creative thinking and come up with solutions that take into account the bigger picture. You’ll also learn how understanding your organizational value chain can help you connect to the organization’s strategy and implement it more effectively.
Leading with Strategic Thinking
Charting the future in today’s business environment requires leaders to think strategically like never before. Strategic thinking requires analyzing opportunities and problems from a broad perspective, continually assessing your organization and industry, and applying your insights to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. In this course, you’ll learn the characteristics that distinguish leading with strategic thinking and the competencies required to do so. You’ll learn how strategic management incorporates sound business strategy into your decision making, helping you meet your team and organization goals.