This course offers students a strong foundation in the professional skills concepts, applications, and best practices required for careers in these dynamic sectors of the economy. Although the main focus of the program is on operations in the hospitality industry, students will acquire a comprehensive inventory of transferrable skills across a wide spectrum of business functions found in all business and not-for-profit ventures.
Specifically, students will gain applicable skills and operational knowledge of hotels, restaurants, and bars, including the front- and back-of-the-house functions, human resource management, marketing management, revenue management, financial planning and control, events planning, and strategic decision making.
Upon completion of this program, the successful student will have reliably demonstrated the ability to:
- Model professional communication skills by conveying ideas in a positive, inclusive and persuasive manner through a variety of media, including written reports, email, oral presentations, and workplace meetings, and effectively integrating MS Office suite applications into the message delivery.
- Analyze a hospitality situation and present a solution using mathematical methods incorporating financial and ratio analyses, and display a summary to illustrate the solution using Excel financial tools and charts.
- Identify the responsibilities, interdependencies, and reporting relationships among management roles in lodging operation departments; and evaluate strategies used to establish room rates, forecast room availability, manage overbookings and maximize hotel revenue.
- Model methods and promote organizational behaviors that create and maintain guest relationships based on satisfaction and trust.
- Understand how financial transactions are recorded and summarized to prepare the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement; explain relationships among the financial statements and how they are used and interpreted by various hospitality industry stakeholders.
- Analyze practical restaurant management tasks including menu design and menu engineering, developing a business and marketing plan, planning the kitchen and bar, and financing and leasing a location.
- Establish financial standards and controls of food and beverage service operations including the budgeting, cost analysis of inventory and production, labor costs, and compliance with all related regulatory requirements.
- Use marketing concepts, research, and management strategies to advertise, promote and sell hospitality services using traditional and digital media.
- Recommend specific practices and procedures to analyze workforce needs, designs jobs, and attract, select, train, evaluate, and retain valued employees.
- Understand and identify the legal rights, duties, liabilities, and risks of managers, owners, employees, guests, and agents in the hospitality industry; identify the local, provincial, and federal laws that apply to hospitality establishments and identify procedures to ensure compliance.
- Develop an event strategy, identify potential clients, develop proposals, build an event budget, and coordinate event execution.
