Training for tomorrow's success

Accor Middle East director of human resources Estelle Chambost-Irshaid explains why it is necessary that hotel industry training should be focused on customer service, sales expertise, management and leadership skills

Have you cut back on training in 2009?

Estelle Chambost-Irshaid: It’s very clear that in every company it’s easy to cut on training, but the messages have been strong from head office internationally and locally that we still need to continue training and developing our employees.

We have maybe reassessed our priorities in the sense that computer training might be a bit revised or reduced, but skills in hotel customer service are more important than ever.

It’s also about sales training and making everybody aware that they are all in the position to boost sales, no matter what their job is.

We are continuing with management training because we are developing and opening new hotels in the region.

We need to develop the managers of tomorrow.

Advertisement

This year, we have three managers that have been selected to be on our international hospitality management programme. Held in Paris, it provides for a maximum of 30 people a year and consists of three periods of 10 days’ training over the course of a year. At the end of the year, they have a project to work on that they present to the CEO and COO of the company, so it gives them a lot of solid training, the chance to network with colleagues from other areas and the opportunity to get visibility from top management. It’s a long-term investment for us and it’s 100% funded by Accor.

We have regional HR meetings where we have one-day training as we remember to train others but often forget to train ourselves.

What types of training do you offer?

EC: We have programmes very much based in the Middle East and some others that are worldwide.

What we are doing in terms of training has a lot to do with training in the hotel and on the job — we don’t train on computers or engineering, but we train from the new starters right through to the management level to develop their leadership, presentation and marketing skills.

We are fortunate to have one of the 16 branches of the Academie Accor worldwide based in Dubai. It has a team of five trainers and delivers training courses as per the request of the hotels. We also have once-a-month training courses taking place at Academie Accor in Knowledge Village, [Dubai], a learning centre for Accor in the region that people from all our hotels attend.