Career Fields in Hospitality

Oracle Academy Tech Chat

In this episode host Tyra Crockett Peirce speaks with Richard Oram from the Oracle Hospitality team on the wide and varying career options available hospitality.

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Episode Transcript:

00;00;09;03 - 00;00;27;26 Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. 00;00;27;28 - 00;00;55;09 Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce. I'm your host, Tara Crockett Pierce. Today I am joined by Richard Oram from the Oracle Hospitality Team. Richard studied tourism management at Birmingham University and worked in hotel operations and management for IAG and Forte before starting with MICROS in 1999, which was acquired by Oracle in 2014. 00;00;55;11 - 00;01;06;18 He worked his way up from a trainer to a product manager to a regional director and now in strategy. Welcome, Richard. So to start off, can you give me a bit about your background in your role at Oracle? 00;01;06;22 - 00;01;26;06 Yeah, So I really started in hospitality by mistake. I was at university and just wanted some extra cash to pay for going out and other bits and pieces. So I took a job at a Holiday Inn in Birmingham City Center, setting up conference rooms in the evenings to easy money. But I ended up then starting work on the bar, and then I started. 00;01;26;06 - 00;01;46;00 Then I thought, this is quite fun. I'm still at university studying for a degree. And then I started working on in the night staff, doing light auditing on research, on reception, finished my degree. So I just found a job then near my parents house until I got a proper job and end up working this hotel for four years. 00;01;46;03 - 00;02;02;10 And during that four years I would be in a new computer system and the guys from Microsoft were really great and I showed some interest and they said, Why don't you come and work for us? And that happened in 1999. What we are trained to for I'm still here. 00;02;02;13 - 00;02;18;15 I get it. I actually started Oracle in 2002, and I'm still here as well. And it's been a really wonderful, a great place to work for. So what different roles exist within hospitality and is there a clear career path? 00;02;18;17 - 00;02;39;14 Yes, definitely. There's so many different roles in hospitality, and some of them people would never even think of. So you've got your traditional roles of a receptionist, reception manager, reservation staff who work in the back office. You've got the groups, teams, sales teams, and so on, the housekeeping, food and beverage at work in the restaurant and bars and all the conference and banqueting staff. 00;02;39;17 - 00;03;03;16 But there's also all these people that work in the background that you never see. Like there's engineers that deal with all the maintenance. There's decorators that deal with all the paint work. There's people that buy all the leisure, at least so spas, spa and leisure centers at the properties. So there's a whole variety of different areas right through to sort of head office functions like financing and h.r. 00;03;03;19 - 00;03;26;15 So it's not all about the person sitting at the reception desk checking people in. There's a whole group of people doing different roles which exist in many different industries. But they all sort of focus on hospitality here. So dealing with the guest is the main criteria for hospitality and for career planning. Well, yeah, you can start as like I did working as a conference and banqueting porter. 00;03;26;17 - 00;03;51;16 You can work your way up to a manager and so on. And most traditional route is people who start, say, working as a receptionist then become a reception supervisor, then then they become the front office team manager, then they become the rooms division manager and eventually they come to general manager. And from a general manager you can then go up to sort of a regional manager and then up to head office as the director or the overall CEO of the hotel group. 00;03;51;18 - 00;03;59;09 There's many different ways to stay in this industry in growing your career, and it's not always when you've got hospitality in your mindset from the start. 00;03;59;11 - 00;04;03;06 Do you have to know hospitality to work in hospitality? 00;04;03;08 - 00;04;25;21 Not at all. And a lot like my own and many of my colleagues, we didn't know hospitality. We stepped into it because it was. There's always jobs in hospitality. That's the one good thing about hospitality. There's always recruitment and the training and on the job, a lot of it is common sense. So what can reception you want to deliver? 00;04;25;21 - 00;04;50;18 Good customer service and as a customer, you expect good customer service for the people you're dealing with. So it's very easy to learn on the job of how to deliver that customer service. And also with technology nowadays, how to pick up the systems you're using really quickly. And like I was saying before, to things like people who work in the finance for a hotel, they could have worked in a finance or an open asset management company. 00;04;50;18 - 00;04;59;13 They could have a banking industry. You don't have to know hospitality to work in the hospitality industry. Suddenly cross-overs with those different functions. 00;04;59;15 - 00;05;08;04 So given that we actually work for one of the world's largest technology companies, where does technology fit into hospitality? 00;05;08;06 - 00;05;29;15 It's a surprise in many places nowadays. So in the old days, hands. Let's talk it out, I say 20 years ago, which makes you feel very old. Really, the only people that used a computer system was technology. Whether people making reservations and the people checking people in. Everything else was done on paper or spreadsheets. Whereas nowadays everybody has an app for something. 00;05;29;17 - 00;05;54;02 So if you've got housekeeping, they're now walking around the app. They know that room. What I once just checked out, they know they're going to do service that room. So they're doing all that through an app. And it's the same with people like engineering. And when know there's a maintenance issue, it gets flagged in the system or their smart sensors in the bedroom telling them there's an issue with the heating, the air conditioning all fills back to those people sitting in the back office flagging up on their system. 00;05;54;09 - 00;06;19;24 But something needs to be done. And again, years back, this is all manual pieces of paper all over the place. So technology has really revolutionized what's happening in hotels. And it's so moving forward with things like AI, which I don't want to go into because I don't really understand AI in great depth. But I also think of automating so many of those tasks which are quite mundane, but allowing the staff to focus on delivering sort of better service to their customers. 00;06;19;26 - 00;06;44;12 And just one thing that I was always intrigued by, when I was a trainer, I was at one hotel, top five star hotel in London, and we had a training session and the training session was called Painters. I was going to line up with these trained painters on a computer system, and the reason why is because the painters would need to know that this really special access to touch up the gold leaf paint that existed on wood work and picture frames in the bedroom. 00;06;44;14 - 00;06;57;22 And then these are artists, the painters by trade, no knowledge of hospitality. But to do that, to deliver their job, they had to be able to use a computer system and know that Mr. Smith has left room one or one. They can go in and touch up that paint. 00;06;57;24 - 00;07;09;06 That's so fascinating. So given that Oracle is a technology company, we have micros, which is for hospitality, how does MICROS kind of fit in to hospitality? 00;07;09;09 - 00;07;44;14 Okay. So Microsoft, as we know, is now Oracle hospitality. But Marcus was the original company that Oracle purchased. It started back in the late 1970s, early eighties, when technology was still evolving. And we provide pretty much everything that you need to run a hotel. So if it's taking that reservation, checking customers in, managing all the housekeeping, the financing, paying travel agents, commissions for their bookings or the other bookings on websites, all of that's done by a microsoft or Oracle hospitality system and right through to what you see in the bar. 00;07;44;14 - 00;07;59;25 So we go into a coffee shop, it might say Marcus Oracle on the tell all of that is our equipment. And so taking orders, managing stock and operating that whole business as if it does one property right through to an entire rate or entire brand using our systems. 00;08;00;04 - 00;08;19;17 I've actually been to many hotels and seen the Oracle Microsoft branding on the hotels that I've stayed in. So it's really great to see that Oracle is involved in this space as well and how this kind of fits in. So my next question is why does hospitality become so addictive as a career? 00;08;19;19 - 00;08;45;00 It really gets into your blood. It's I think the thing is everybody is working long shifts and it's hard work, but you get to work with so many different people. And some people stay with these businesses for years, others come in for a few months. There's always a change of people. You get to know different people, but it's because it's such a great bond of people all collaborating together to deliver a good guest experience. 00;08;45;02 - 00;09;04;00 But it really gets entwined in your whole ethos and your way of working. And as people now I work with 25, 30 years ago in hotels, we still in contact on Facebook, still meet up occasionally. And it's it really is, as I said before, it gets right into your blood work in hospitality. That's part of the reason what I'm doing now. 00;09;04;03 - 00;09;12;08 I'm not directly in a hotel, but we're still working with all these hospitality organizations, making sure that they're delivering excellent customer service to their guests. 00;09;12;11 - 00;09;24;03 So my final question is, if you could give one piece of advice to faculty, your students, that are interested in pursuing a career in hospitality, what would it be? 00;09;24;05 - 00;09;45;18 Definitely don't rule it out. It's a great place to start to gain exposure into so many different skills you could then use in other industries. If it's just dealing with customer service operations, finance, engineering. There's so many different things that happen in a hotel that you can then take to other industries. And there's people I've known it started in a hotel. 00;09;45;18 - 00;10;12;22 They went off to work for a completely into hospitals, so almost the same, but different lectures at the end work in hospitals because it was the same sort of thing. It's dealing with deaths or patients. This scenario, but it's still things are operations, managing something to deliver an end result. And it's a really is a great place just to get grounding on how to deliver and make sure things are done in a certain timeframe to a certain service level. 00;10;12;24 - 00;10;39;15 You know, I think that that's a really great piece of ice. I remember I was flying back from a business trip from Toronto through Atlanta back to where I live, and I remember we got stuck up in a hurricane and just the great customer service skills at the reservation desks gave us to make sure that we were taking care of the we're on time and we just had another one not that long ago, same kind of thing where our flight was canceled. 00;10;39;21 - 00;11;10;14 Speaker 2 We were rerouted immediately. And just the wonderful people skills and customer service skills that you build in working in a hospitality industry or in a travel industry that are so important as you're, you know, they can be transferred over to any industry, which I think is really one of the most important things to have, is is learning these really great frontline personal and customer service skills that I think hospitality probably teaches better than almost any other industry. 00;11;10;16 - 00;11;25;01 But definitely a big thanks to Richard for giving me some more information about hospitality. To learn more about Oracle Academy and our resources, visit Academy dot Oracle dot com and subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening. 00;11;25;03 - 00;11;31;21 That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.