The Hotel and Tourism industry offers you many different potential career options. Even though the current economic downturn has made finding those opportunities more challenging for you, it is still an industry that gives you many choices.
You certainly learn about many potential career options in your subject lectures and through the industry professionals who come to campus as “Professor for a Day”. However, you might have more questions about specific career paths in the industry and even how to get started. Recognizing that fact, we have created a new career advice support system to help give you direction on the best career path for you. As part of our academic advising programme we began this year through Mr. Willie-Wilson Chan, we now have added a “Voluntary Faculty Advising” support system for him to refer you for career advice.
We have a great deal of industry experience on our SHTM academic staff/faculty and we want you to take advantage of it. Therefore, we invited faculty members to join a “Voluntary Faculty Advising” pool by letting Willie know what our special areas of expertise are so we can provide advice to you. For example, I have a great deal of experience in hotel sales and marketing, so my name is on the list for sales and marketing career options.
Of course, this is open to all undergraduate students regardless of what year you are in. Willie can connect you to one of the “Voluntary Faculty Advisors” who is an expert in your interest area. He says “Don't hesitate and come talk to me. My door is always open for you!!" and now he has even more to offer!
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
SHTM is Providing Support for Final Year Student’s Job Opportunities
As you are all well aware, we are facing the worst global economic crisis of your lifetime, if not mine. I’m sure this is making many of you who will be graduating soon anxious about your future. While there is no easy solution for this dilemma you are facing, we want you to know that faculty and staff of SHTM have begun taking several actions to help better connect you to future job opportunities.
One of those actions is the establishment of a "Career Appointment Services (CAS)" provide by our Industry Partnership office for you. The objectives of the CAS are:
1. Assist our final year students in getting jobs in the hospitality industry
2. Facilitate our industry partners to recruit our graduates.
The "Career Appointment Services (CAS)" works as follows:
Sometimes SHTM faculty and staff may receive requests from industry friends to refer or recommend students to an organization. Some may refer or recommend students they are most comfortable with to the directly to the organization. However, in other cases, they may want to reach a broader student audience or more information is needed, so in these cases the SHTM faculty or staff member will refer the requests to CAS.
CAS will follow up with the requests, collect more information about the offer, and communicate with all of you, the students. CAS will communicate with students via email, website or notice board.
The CAS contact person is Edelweiss Yeung (email hmey@polyu.edu.hk, tel 34002646). Since this is a new service, requests have only just begun, so it make take a little time before many job opportunities are identified, so be patient as we are working on it.
In addition to the CAS, other job referral options might be taken by SHTM faculty and staff, depending on the nature of the job openings and each faculty member's individual preference on referring, such as:
• When there is a job referral opportunity identified by faculty members, they can either notify all eligible candidates or pre-screen the candidates for the organisation as one option.
• Another option will be to utilize the SHTM Student Association External VP as a liaison to the students when trying to access student interest in a specific job opportunity.
• Another avenue for referring specific job opportunities is by refer students that faculty have advised in the Honours Thesis process as they are more familiar with these students and their capabilities. So, be sure your supervisor knows of your career path interests
Still other actions we (the faculty and staff of SHTM) are taking are:
• Introducing students to any potential employers at the Professor for a Day and Career Day on March 4.
• Subject Lectures have been encouraged to lead their classes to visit the exhibitors at the Career Day on March 4 as one of the class activities to promote awareness of job opportunities.
• Utilize the SHTM Alumni Association network to proactively assist in the recruiting process by encouraging them to think first of our SHTM grads.
Another key initiative is the Student Year Book you probably have already heard about. The School is preparing a Student Year Book for all final year students in 2009. All final year students have been invited to provide a brief profile and a photo to go into the Student Year Book. The Student Year Book will be distributed to our industry partners, for us to encourage them to employ our students upon graduation. Students are reminded to submit their information to the School by 26 February 2009
Other options regarding the possibility of continuing your education or working as research assistants are also being explored through the entire PolyU efforts to help you. You’ll hear more about those options soon.
So, as you can see, we are working on being pro-active on your behalf to identify job opportunities even in these difficult times. As I said earlier, it won’t be easy, but hopefully it will be easier with all of us working together. If you have any other suggestions or thoughts, please feel free to let me know.
One of those actions is the establishment of a "Career Appointment Services (CAS)" provide by our Industry Partnership office for you. The objectives of the CAS are:
1. Assist our final year students in getting jobs in the hospitality industry
2. Facilitate our industry partners to recruit our graduates.
The "Career Appointment Services (CAS)" works as follows:
Sometimes SHTM faculty and staff may receive requests from industry friends to refer or recommend students to an organization. Some may refer or recommend students they are most comfortable with to the directly to the organization. However, in other cases, they may want to reach a broader student audience or more information is needed, so in these cases the SHTM faculty or staff member will refer the requests to CAS.
CAS will follow up with the requests, collect more information about the offer, and communicate with all of you, the students. CAS will communicate with students via email, website or notice board.
The CAS contact person is Edelweiss Yeung (email hmey@polyu.edu.hk, tel 34002646). Since this is a new service, requests have only just begun, so it make take a little time before many job opportunities are identified, so be patient as we are working on it.
In addition to the CAS, other job referral options might be taken by SHTM faculty and staff, depending on the nature of the job openings and each faculty member's individual preference on referring, such as:
• When there is a job referral opportunity identified by faculty members, they can either notify all eligible candidates or pre-screen the candidates for the organisation as one option.
• Another option will be to utilize the SHTM Student Association External VP as a liaison to the students when trying to access student interest in a specific job opportunity.
• Another avenue for referring specific job opportunities is by refer students that faculty have advised in the Honours Thesis process as they are more familiar with these students and their capabilities. So, be sure your supervisor knows of your career path interests
Still other actions we (the faculty and staff of SHTM) are taking are:
• Introducing students to any potential employers at the Professor for a Day and Career Day on March 4.
• Subject Lectures have been encouraged to lead their classes to visit the exhibitors at the Career Day on March 4 as one of the class activities to promote awareness of job opportunities.
• Utilize the SHTM Alumni Association network to proactively assist in the recruiting process by encouraging them to think first of our SHTM grads.
Another key initiative is the Student Year Book you probably have already heard about. The School is preparing a Student Year Book for all final year students in 2009. All final year students have been invited to provide a brief profile and a photo to go into the Student Year Book. The Student Year Book will be distributed to our industry partners, for us to encourage them to employ our students upon graduation. Students are reminded to submit their information to the School by 26 February 2009
Other options regarding the possibility of continuing your education or working as research assistants are also being explored through the entire PolyU efforts to help you. You’ll hear more about those options soon.
So, as you can see, we are working on being pro-active on your behalf to identify job opportunities even in these difficult times. As I said earlier, it won’t be easy, but hopefully it will be easier with all of us working together. If you have any other suggestions or thoughts, please feel free to let me know.
Friday, January 30, 2009
New BSc Conversion in Convention and Event Management
Hi All,
Welcome to the first blog posting on our SHTM Undergraduate Programmes blog. From time to time, I will post items here for your information and comments in an effort to make certain we are keeping you up-to-date on everything happening with our SHTM Undergraduates Progammes at PolyU.
In that regard, the first thing I'd like to do is announce that begininng in the 2009/2010 school year, we will have a new BSc Conversion degree in Convention and Event Management. This will be our third BSc Conversion degree option and is designed to address the needs of this growing field in hotel and tourism management. In fact, it is the first BSc degree in the field offered in Hong Kong, which we are very proud about.
The Programme will include seven (7) specialization subjects in Convention and Event Management, plus an additional two (2) semester elective in Special Event Management I & II. The subjects were designed with the input from our Convention and Event Task Force of industry leaders from all aspects of the M.I.C.E. (Meetings, Incentives, Conventions, and Exhibitions) industry. They include previously offer subjects of:
Welcome to the first blog posting on our SHTM Undergraduate Programmes blog. From time to time, I will post items here for your information and comments in an effort to make certain we are keeping you up-to-date on everything happening with our SHTM Undergraduates Progammes at PolyU.
In that regard, the first thing I'd like to do is announce that begininng in the 2009/2010 school year, we will have a new BSc Conversion degree in Convention and Event Management. This will be our third BSc Conversion degree option and is designed to address the needs of this growing field in hotel and tourism management. In fact, it is the first BSc degree in the field offered in Hong Kong, which we are very proud about.
The Programme will include seven (7) specialization subjects in Convention and Event Management, plus an additional two (2) semester elective in Special Event Management I & II. The subjects were designed with the input from our Convention and Event Task Force of industry leaders from all aspects of the M.I.C.E. (Meetings, Incentives, Conventions, and Exhibitions) industry. They include previously offer subjects of:
- Events and Tourism Management
- Meeting Management
- Convention Venue Management
- Exhibition Management
Plus new subjects of:
- Convention Sales and Service
- Catering and Banquet Service Managment
- Special Topics in Convention and Events
- Special Events Management I & II (an elective)
We expect this to be a very popular degree programme that will open up new career opportunities for SHTM graduates in the field. However, we want to get the best students, just like you, so please let your friends currently working on hotel and tourism related Associate Degrees (AD) or Higher Diplomas (HD) at other colleges and universities know about it too.
If you have specific questions about the programme, please contact GO and they'd be happy to help. If' you'd like to discuss more about the field and it's opporunities for you, don't hesitate to contact me at hmdjones@polyu.edu.hk.
Additionally, if you have any thoughts and ideas on promoting the programme, please feel free to post a comment to the blog.
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