Top 5 Hospitality Management Essential Qualifications
The hospitality management sector is a huge area, requiring an often diverse range of skills. The best business schools provide a strong mix of core hospitality management qualifications which cover the fundamental professional requirements. This training is well-structured to meet the multiple needs of the industry.
Hospitality management basics
Management roles in the hospitality industry tend to be considered purely service related. That’s rather an over-simplification of these roles.
The real management functions in hospitality are:
- Business management
- Asset management
- Logistics
- Financial management
- Staff management
- Administration
- Risk management
- Statutory compliance
- OHS compliance
Training for these roles requires very strong skills development and exceptionally thorough, well-integrated qualifications. This is an extremely competitive industry, as well as a demanding work environment for managers, and performance requirements are very high.
The Top 5 essential qualifications, explained
As you can see from the list of roles above, there are multiple skill sets involved. Hospitality management trainees need both specialist training in the industry and excellent all-round business training and qualifications.
The Top 5 essential qualifications are:
- Business management: Critically important at all levels of hospitality management, this training is extremely valuable as a core functions qualification in all sectors of the industry.
- Commerce: Highly relevant to profitability and good business practices, commerce in the hospitality industry is one of the primary focuses of operational management.
- Industry-specific training: This essential training relates to the specific needs of the industry, including the risk management, OHS and statutory compliance needs of the sector.
- Accountancy: A business fundamental, and one of the major functional roles of hospitality management.
- Administration: Hospitality administration can be extremely complex, involving multiple areas of administration and many different services.
Essential qualifications, the employment market and career development
The essential qualifications provide a very wide range of areas for career advancement. Each of these areas involves a professional role which can be developed according to both career goals and job opportunities. The very high job mobility these qualifications provide can be used to exploit career opportunities across the entire gigantic hospitality sector. These qualifications also give excellent options for rapid promotion and career development.
It’s important to understand how qualifications streams and management careers interact in the hospitality industry. Career progression in this field is usually based on progressively upgrading qualifications.
For example:
In business management, a hospitality manager can reasonably be expected to develop their professional qualifications to MBA level for career purposes through the business management qualifications stream. The MBA provides a huge range of corporate career opportunities. In major hospitality industry operations, the MBA is a benchmark requirement for senior management roles.
Similarly, roles like a corporate Chief Financial Officer develop through the commerce training stream, upgrading progressively. Major hospitality industry corporations like cruise lines and hotel chains are highly focused on financial management, and these are some of the best CFO jobs on Earth.
The essential qualifications are the key to these incredible careers. If you’re just starting out in the industry, explore your business degrees options. You definitely won’t regret it.
