Hospitality Management is a career which is gaining more attention throughout the world than it has in the past. Before, hotel managers usually graduated college with some degree in business. Now, there are entire degree programs designed to give students the opportunity to focus their studies on the interesting world of hotels. If you choose this career, there are several things which you will need to know before getting into it.

Job titles

Hotels are multi-faceted operations which exist together to create an entire guest experience. Many hotels have several departments, such as Sales, Rooms Division, and Food and Beverage. Within these departments, there can be several levels of management. For example, if you choose to go into Food and Beverage area, you may look into restaurant management, catering management, banquet management, room service management, beverage management, or you can run the entire food and beverage division at a hotel with a Director of Food and Beverage Position.

Growth

Hospitality Management is a career with tremendous growth potential. According to the Les Roches School of Hospitality Management, the hotel industry is expected to grow 4 percent per year through 2019. This provides tremendous opportunities for budding hotel managers. With this type of growth, hotel managers can gain experience quickly and move up in the chain of command. Particularly talented managers may ultimately run their own property as a general manager.

Skill Set

Although hotels look like a straightforward business, they are actually extremely complex. Hotel managers are required to have a multi-faceted skill set which will allow them to solve problems related to guest and business issues. The more versatile a manager is, the better equipped she is to jump into different departments to make the guest experience a positive one.

Guests.

The World Tourism Organization predicts that there will be 1.6 billion tourists worldwide by the year 2020. With this many people travelling, every hospitality manager needs to be able to successfully deal with guests. Hotel guests are a unique breed of people who are spending their hard earned dollars for service. Their standards are high and managers need to understand their needs in order to be successful. In order to attract and keep guests, they need to feel taken care of by the hotel or restaurant they are visiting. A manager who understands how to do this will be very successful in this position.

Employees

Managers need to be able to lead employees as a team which successfully guides the hotel toward its goals. Les Roches predicts that 1 out of every 11.8 jobs worldwide will be held somewhere in the hospitality industry by 2019. This means that managers will have a wide range of people and personalities to deal with. Understanding how to motivate a team of people and keep them on track with good morale is a vital skill, and even more so in the future.