What job titles can you expect to see in hospitality industry job postings? The industry is quite broad. It includes jobs working in hotels, restaurants, casinos, theme parks, cruise lines, and other facilities that help customers meet their leisurely needs.

Many jobs in the hospitality industry involve dealing with customers face-to-face in a variety of ways. But there are also behind-the-scenes jobs that include positions in sales, marketing, and accounting. Food services jobs also abound in the hospitality industry, including wait staff and food preparation jobs. There are many management-level jobs across these areas as well, including hotel managers and executive chefs.

Given this range, jobs in the hospitality industry can either involve a lot — or very little — customer interaction. Many jobs are entry level, but hospitality is an area where you can climb the ladder to a managerial role accompanied by more responsibilities, along with a higher salary.


 Most Common Hospitality Job Titles

The following is a list of some of the most common job titles within the hospitality industry. 

Concierge. A concierge interacts directly with customers, providing them with various services. They may respond to requests (for instance, "Can you book me a restaurant reservation?") or anticipate what customers might need. These services could range from providing a babysitter to getting tickets to a show to suggesting a restaurant.

At some hotels, this is an entry-level job. However, some luxury hotels require concierges to have years of hospitality experience. A concierge needs to be a problem solver with extensive customer-service skills who is unflappable and can handle difficult patrons.

Other front-of-the-house hospitality jobs include:

    Casino Host
    Cruise Ship Attendant
    Front Desk Associate
    Front Desk Supervisor
    Front Office Attendant
    Front-of-House Manager
    Gaming Dealer
    Guest Relations Manager
    Guest Services Associate
    Guest Services Supervisor
    Hotel Clerk
    Hotel Receptionist
    Reservationist
    Reservations Agent

Event Planner. Many hotels have conference rooms or event spaces that they rent out for various events, ranging from meetings to weddings. An event planner works with a company, or an individual, to arrange the event and then ensures it runs smoothly.

Hospitality jobs in the field of event planning include:

    Events Manager
    Executive Conference Manager
    Executive Meeting Manager
    Meeting and Convention Planner
    Meeting Coordinator
    Meeting Manager
    Meeting Planner
    Meeting Specialist
    Special Events Manager
    Wedding Coordinator

Executive Chef. An executive chef is a managerial role that involves a lot of work behind the scenes in the hospitality industry. An executive chef oversees the food operations in restaurants, hotels, casinos, or other venues that serve food. People in this role supervise cooks, sous chefs, and other kitchen employees. They typically order all of the food, plan the meals, and prepare food in the kitchen.

While it is not necessarily required, many head chefs have some training through a culinary school, technical school, community college, or a four-year college.

Most people work their way up to executive chef from entry-level roles like line cooks. Over time, they develop the managerial skills required to oversee an entire kitchen, and the cooking skills to develop menus.

Other jobs related to executive chef, including jobs many people have while working their way up to executive chef, include:

    Cafe Manager
    Catering Manager
    Chef
    Cook
    Food and Beverage Manager
    Kitchen Manager
    Pastry Chef
    Restaurant Manager
    Sous Chef

Hotel General Manager. A hotel general manager, or hotel manager, makes sure that a hotel (or inn, lodge, or any other venue with sleeping accommodations) is running smoothly. This involves interacting with guests, managing staff, handling the finances of the property, and much more.

Some hotel managers have a degree or certificate in hotel management, while others have a high school diploma and a few years of experience working in a hotel. Hotel general managers need to have strong business skills, management skills, and interpersonal skills.

Other jobs related to the management and/or administration of a hospitality facility include:

    Back Office Assistant
    Catering Sales Manager
    Director of Hotel Sales
    Director of Marketing and Sales
    Group Sales Manager
    Guest Room Sales Manager
    Hotel Manager
    Lodging Manager
    Sales and Marketing Manager
    Shift Leader
    Shift Manager
    Spa Manager
    Wedding Sales Manager

Housekeeper. Housekeepers are responsible for maintaining a standard of cleanliness throughout a hotel or other hospitality venue. They clean individual hotel rooms as well as the common areas. Housekeepers within the hospitality industry make beds, do laundry, clean bathrooms, stock linens, and more.

Being a housekeeper requires some physical stamina because you often have to lift heavy loads and be on your feet most of the day.

There are many other jobs related to maintenance and cleaning in the hospitality industry. There are also opportunities for management positions within these areas. Some other related housekeeping job titles include:

    Director of Housekeeping
    Director of Maintenance
    Director of Operations
    Executive Housekeeper
    Housekeeper
    Housekeeping Aide
    Housekeeping Supervisor
    Lead Housekeeper
    Maid
    Maintenance Supervisor
    Maintenance Worker

Porter. Porters are tasked with handling baggage for guests. They might bring luggage up to guests’ rooms or take luggage down to the lobby.

A porter is one of many support staff positions in the hospitality industry. Another common position is that of valet (also known as parking lot attendant). A valet parks patrons’ cars when they come to a hotel, restaurant, or other venue.

Other support staff positions similar to that of porter and valet include:

    Baggage Porter
    Bell Attendant
    Bellhop
    Bellman
    Driver
    Parking Lot Attendant
    Valet
    Valet Attendant
    Valet Parking Attendant

Waiter/Waitress. Waiters and waitresses work in restaurants, bars, hotels, casinos, and other food-serving establishments. They interact directly with customers taking orders, serving food and beverages, and take payments from patrons.

While no formal education is required, waiters and waitresses must have strong interpersonal and communication skills. They also have to be detail-oriented because they need to remember customers’ orders, especially complicated drink orders. This job is ideal for people in the hospitality industry who want to engage with customers face-to-face.

Other job titles similar to waiter and waitress in the hospitality industry include:

    Back Waiter
    Banquet Server
    Barback
    Barista
    Bartender
    Busser
    Cafe Manager
    Catering Assistant
    Food Runner
    Food Server
    Head Waiter
    Host
    Hostess
    Maître d’
    Server
    Sommelier

Waiter or Waitress Job Description

    On average, waiters and waitresses make $7.14 an hour
    Tips usually make up most of waiters' and waitresses' pay
    Waiter and waitress jobs are great for people with outgoing personalities

Are you the type of person who can charm even the grumpiest of old men? Could you carry a hot bowl of soup through a hurricane without breaking a sweat? Then you’ve got what it takes to be a great waiter or waitress. Most waiters and waitresses, also called servers, work in full-service restaurants. They greet customers, take food orders, bring food and drinks to the tables and take payment and make change.

Casual dining restaurants and caf?s will expect you to be quick, efficient and friendly. Casual dining restaurants can be small family-owned restaurants or larger chain restaurants like Applebee's and Cracker Barrel . You may have to make drinks, salads and desserts all while serving several tables at one time.

Upscale restaurants will require a little more of you. You may need to know about wine and food pairings, understand how each dish is prepared and be able to make food recommendations to customers. Some fine dining restaurants even require servers to prepare specialty food items at a customer's table.

Make no mistake, being a waiter or waitress is hard work. You will have to deal with rude customers, screaming children and people who don't tip. You will roll a lot of silverware and clean a lot of ketchup bottles. Your feet will hurt. But it's a great career for someone who likes to work with people, and waiting tables can be great money for someone with the right mix of personality and serving skills.
How much do waiters and waitresses make?

Since most of your pay will likely come from tips, the better a server you are, the more money you'll make. But on average, waiters and waitresses make $7.14 an hour. The minimum a restaurant can pay you is $2.13 an hour - the rest of your pay will come from tips. However, if you score a job in a busy, expensive restaurant, you can make upwards of $20 an hour on a good night. Beware, though: if you get stuck with bad tippers or a bad shift you can end up walking out with little or no money.
Education requirements

You'll be getting a lot of on-the-job training as a server, but for the most part, no formal education is required. Some do require that you have a high school diploma. Having a bachelor's degree is always a plus - especially if you want to end up in a fine dining restaurant or eventually enter management.
Career paths for waiters and waitresses

After working your way up to a coveted shift at your first waiter or waitress job , it's likely that you'll move on to a better-paying server position at a different restaurant. After working there for a few years, you may transition into a managerial role. Some restaurants have a formal manager training program, while others require several years of experience before promoting servers.
The future of waiter and waitress jobs

People like to go out to eat, and that's not going to change anytime soon. According to the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics), there will be nearly 2.6 million waiter and waitress jobs available by the year 2016, which is 13 percent more than are available now.

6 Hotel Management Tips for New Hospitality Managers

You’ve finally done it. After years of working long, low-paid hours as a bellhop or concierge, you’ve worked your way up to hotel manager.

Now you’re the gal or guy in charge. And it’s terrifying.

After all, so many people depend on you. The guests depend on you to make their experience a happy one. Your staff depend on your direction to do their jobs. And most of all, the owner expects you to meet revenue goals. No excuses.

But don’t worry, you’ve got this. After all, all those years you’ve invested in the hospitality business is what made you such an attractive hire as a hotel manager to begin with.

So relax, trust in your abilities, and take these tips for new hospitality managers to heart. We’ve scoured advice from all sorts of great resources around the web on hotel management, and have compiled some of the best advice below.
1. Find a mentor

Mentors are such an awesome resource, especially ones who have experience in the hospitality industry. It’s one thing to read about the industry in a book, and it’s another to have a discussion about the subject with someone who knows what they’re talking about and wants you to succeed.

But what if you don’t know anyone who would make a great mentor? That’s OK. You just need to find someone and it’s not as hard as you think.

Go through your professional network and ask a hotel manager you respect to meet you for coffee. Spend that time asking some of your deepest questions, and really, really listen to the responses.

You’ll find many hotel managers would love to become a mentor to someone, if they were only asked. Even if they’re a complete stranger at first, most will be flattered to be approached. And anyway, the worst thing they can do is say “no.”
2. Be selective in your hiring
A hotel manager is only as good as his or her team. You’re not hiring a line cook to work an idiot-proof system at McDonald’s. You’re hiring people who need to be both highly skilled and highly personable.

Hiring the wrong person will just cause immense frustration for you. Your job is tough enough as it is—if you’re going to have to clean up after another employee’s messes, forget about doing a good job at running a hotel.

On the other hand, good employees are a force multiplier. When you can trust employees enough to give them the authority to make decisions, it frees you up to do the really important activities that can help your hotel grow, such as talking with customers and promoting the hotel.

But how do you do that? For one thing, don’t hire only when you have an opening. If you do, you’ll feel rushed to fill the spot and won’t take the time necessary to sort through applicants to find the person with not only the requisite experience, but also the right people skills for the job.

Instead, recruit throughout the year to help you find star talents that will make your job easier and inspire your hotel guests to rave about you later.
3. Focus on leadership, not management

Yeah, it’s in your job title. But if all you’re doing is managing, you’re not really doing a great job of being a hotel manager.

You absolutely must be a leader, and that requires being proactive about how you approach your job, and not simply reacting to every single crisis that rears its head.

One big way you can be a great leader is to delegate. By taking advantage of that great staff you hired, you can free up your time for the more important stuff. But you’ve got to work hard at first, because delegation is not easy. You’ll have to create training materials and take your employees step by step through them until they can take the reins.

Training materials should include clearly defined objectives and performance measurements so your staff knows exactly what you expect from them. Arrange weekly or at least bi-weekly meetings with each individual staff member to make sure they are meeting those standards. And don’t forget to attach nice little bonuses to meeting them so it becomes a positive and motivational experience.

Another part of being an effective leader is being prepared for emergencies. When a crisis happens, you’ve got to be calm and decisive.

Let’s say you overbooked this evening and now a guest doesn’t have a room, and they’re not happy. Treat the guest to a drink on the house and hit the phones to find a nearby hotel room that is even nicer than what they booked, pay for it out of your own pocket, apologize profusely, and bring them to the other hotel yourself. Then consider offering some vouchers redeemable at your hotel should they decide to come to the area again.
4. Communicate, communicate, communicate

This could be a subset of leadership, but I feel like it’s such an important aspect of your job that it needs to be broken into its own section.

You must, must, must keep your staff in the loop, whether that be about a change in policy, new hotel management software, or a problem with the plumbing. If your staff is in the dark, that’s when mistakes happen, and that leads to unhappy customers, which leads to bad reviews, which leads to fewer bookings. It’s important.

As mentioned above, regular meetings with individual members of your staff can help. But you need to go beyond that. Schedule regular meetings with the entire staff to talk about all changes, even small ones.

Send out regular email blasts to your employees. Put up a bulletin board in a space visible to all employees where you can post announcements. Or perhaps find an hotel management app that offers the ability to directly message any employee in the hotel.
5. Listen to your guests

Who’s the best person to talk to in order to find out how well you’re running your hotel? No, it’s not you—you’re a terrible judge of your own performance. Neither is it your staff—they can only offer you limited perspective from their point of view.

Ding ding ding, it’s your guests. At the end of the day, their opinion is the only one that really matters. So talk to them at every opportunity.

Did a customer complain about your hotel online? Great! You’ve just spotted an area of weakness you can correct, and you have a rare opportunity to reach out to the customer and make it right. Many guests simply leave silently and never come back if they don’t enjoy their experience.

But again, don’t be reactive, be proactive. Conduct surveys of your guests to ask them about their experience at your hotel. Use hotel management software with a guest experience management feature, so you can track guest preferences and wow them when they (hopefully) return to the hotel with a personalized experience.

Also, take advantage of the miracle of social media to both promote your hotel and interact directly with customers on a regular basis.
6. Keep learning
All of the most successful people in the world have one thing in common: they read voraciously. There’s a wealth of information out there to absorb, and those who gobble up as much knowledge as they can have the edge over the 99% of people who don’t.

Take just a half hour each day to read up on news in your industry. You’ll be surprised at what you pick up throughout the week. Set aside time every day to read a book on the hotel industry. Reading 10 pages per day may not seem like much, but after a year you’ll have read 3,650 pages, or about 10 sizable books.

Imagine the advantage you’ll have over your peers if you absorb such a huge volume of industry knowledge every year.
What hotel management tips do you have?

If you’ve been around the hotel industry for a bit, you’ve learned a few things yourself that you wish you knew when you got started. So share them in the comments below.

Or, if you’re struggling with one aspect of hotel management, feel free to chime in as well. There’s always someone willing to help.

Restaurant Management 101: 10 Things to Never Do At Work


There are 10 things that can damage your image and reputation in restaurant management. These are things that everyone does, and that no one may condemn you for. They may even be considered acceptable in today’s society. But, if you do these things you will find that they do matter when it comes time to pick the next manager.

Answer Your Cell Phone

Turn cell phones off at work. You do not need to text your husband about dinner when you should be finishing a report. There is no need to check facebook between jobs, or just before a break. While being on your cell phone at work is acceptable in some workplace environments it is a definite ‘no no’ for management candidates.

Cell phones disassociate people from what is happening ‘now’ in the real world. Professional managers and psychologists know that it can take up to 15 minutes to regain your focus. This is lost time. The impact on the workplace costs the restaurant money.

Don’t think that you can escape to the bathroom for a quick text. No one needs the bathroom several times a day. It is a dead give away

Social Networking

I don’t know how many times someone had facebook open in the background on their computer as I walked by. The ‘twinge’ of annoyance is a visceral response. As a manager I am counting on people to do their part so the job is done – properly. When management candidates come to me with excuses as to why their project isn’t done, or why they need overtime, my mind instantly flashes to that facebook tab on their computer.

It also creates a level of suspicion. If you are facebooking what more are you doing? How much time do you waste in a day. It inevitably comes down to one thing. ‘Can I trust you with more responsibility?’ To which the answer is always, ‘no.’

Mentally Arrive Late – Leave Early

As a manager the first hour of my day is intense. The last hour of the day is chaos. I can’t go home until the ‘flow’ is balanced and the problems dealt with. I quickly identify who arrives at work and needs an hour to ‘wake up’, or who mentally ‘clocks out’ 30 minutes before the end of the day. Am I prejudiced against them? No. I just ignore them. I have no time for them. I will focus on the people who will help get the day started, or solve problems. I am especially interested in the people who will solve their own problems in the last two hours of the day.

Do you Give or Take?

There are two types of people in the world. People who give. People who take. If you want to be a management candidate then you need to consider what type of person the current managers see you as.

Givers

    Add to their job
    Add to their environment
    Solve problems
    They plan quickly and take action to finish a job
    Are work and task oriented
    Measure a good day by successful results
    Talk about facts
    Are groomed to be Management Candidates

Takers

    Drain everyone emotionally
    Don’t finish tasks
    Talk about doing things and spend a lot of time planning
    Are social and emotional oriented
    Measure a good day by whether they feel happy
    Talk gossip and are toxic
    Are given low risk, low responsibility, repetitive jobs.