Why I Didn't Pursue a Career in Hotels...

Every time I tell people that I have a degree in Hotel Management, they inevitably ask me why I'm working in retail and not in hotels. It's been eight long years since I made that switch and now the narrative has boiled down to simple facts like work-life balance being shitty in Indian hotels and hotels being bad paymasters. But the actual reasons, while including the aforementioned points, go beyond that. In this post, I'm gonna delve deeper into the several reasons I had not to continue in the hotel industry.

To do that, I'll need to take you back to my college days and outline what the course is all about and what kind of job prospects the candidates have after passing out from a hotel management college. This might be a dreary subject for some of my readers, but I think a lot of my college peeps will actually relate to this post. So many people have this misconception that hotel management is all about the kitchen and food production. That's a rather layman view about it. 

The Hotel Management program trains people to handle all working aspects of a star grade hotel. These include Front Office Management, Guest Relations, Facility Management or Housekeeping, Food Service and lastly Food Production or Kitchen. The course also has some other subjects like Accounting & Food Control which deal with the entrepreneurial aspect of food production. These subjects are actually an integral part of Food Production as a lot of planning goes into running a professional kitchen for it to run optimally and turn a profit.

Most youngster who get into the program actually don't know the nature of the jobs at hotels. And that's where the obvious reasons come into play and most students decide not to join the industry at the end of their course. The hotels in India make you slog like crazy, they literally have unholy work hours with no overtime benefits. I am not sure whether it's because they are trying to cut down on manpower cost or some other reason, they make you slog so much that many candidates leave their jobs within the first six months of joining.

Another problem hotel management students face in India is that they aren't prepared to cope with the service aspect of the jobs. A hotel job is a part of the service industry, be it a job in housekeeping, front office or kitchen, they are all service related jobs. There's a misconception in our country that servile jobs lack in dignity. In my dictionary, any job that keeps the bread on your table is a dignified job. But you'll hear so many kids saying, "I can't be a waiter." or "I can't clean people's rooms, make their beds for a living."

Working in a kitchen is a whole different story. Kitchens are hard work even in foreign countries, due to the sheer nature of the job. Then you also have all the chefs and their egos, which make kitchens a difficult place to work. A lot of aptitude goes into making a career in kitchen. Many people actually pursue higher specialized courses in food production and venture into private kitchens in boutique restaurants, etc which is actually more preferable than the usual kitchen at a five star property.

Coming back to my story, I passed out from IHM, Goa back in 2011. My introduction to the hotel industry had been through a five month industrial training at Goa Marriott Resort. At that point in time, I was interested in Food Production and had actually started my training in Kitchen under Chef Zulficar Karim, sous chef, Indian Banquet Kitchen. The culture was such that my shifts would start at 7am in the morning and go on till midnight or 1am and then I'd be expected to report at 7am again on the next day. The training took its toll on me. I was in a crazy state of mind by the time the training wrapped up, so much so that I'd even contemplated dropping out from the course. Thankfully, I didn't. I got back on my feet, completed my third year and as luck would have it, I got a bunch of jobs during the campus placements.

Now, during campus placements, some hotels select smart candidates and hire them as Management Trainees, who train in various departments and eventually are placed a Assistant Manager in any of the departments post successful complete of an eighteen or twenty four month training period. Otherwise, they hire operations associates, which is basically the ground level position in any of the department. I kept looking for management trainee jobs and I actually got one at Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai but with a catch - it wasn't in the department I wanted to be in. After the harrowing experience at Goa Marriott, I was no longer interested in Kitchen and I had opted to attend interviews as a candidate for a Front Office job but instead got selected for Butler Service. I was a little disappointed by that.

The first job I'd cracked was with the Oberoi Group. It was a respectable offer, but I opted out of it and I'll tell you why. When I went for that interview, I was a little overweight and while handing me the offer letter, the interviewer said to me, "I want you to lose weight by the time you join next year." That had turned me off from that jon. Oberoi anyway has a reputation of hiring fair and pretty people and I felt like I couldn't work at a place that took looks so seriously. I had also secured some other jobs with Sayaji Group, Ananda Hotel, Thomas Cook, my current company and a few others.

After I joined Taj, I was diagnosed with slipped disc and was asked to take a few months' rest if I were to recover. So I left and never looked back. After I recovered, I joined ITC Lifestyle Division at base level as a Sales Associate in a Retail store and worked my way up from there. Thanks to my decent people skills and an acumen for doing things diligently, I rose through the ranks pretty quickly and am at a respectable position now. I handle a lot of responsibility for the division and the brand and am at a good place in life.

So if I were to list down my reasons for opting out of the Hotel industry, they'd be:

1. I didn't want to be in an industry where my looks mattered so much. Even if I were a girl, I'd have opted out of an air hostess job because if I needed to look pretty to get a job, that just sounds wrong to me.

2. Secondly, of course, my physical condition played a role. I felt like I couldn't cope with the gruelling work hours that was a staple in Indian hotels.

3. I was also apprehensive about the work-life balance. Because that scene was crazy. Now that I look back, most people from my batch are doing other things. Only a handful actually stayed with hotels and prospered. Others joined Food Retail, went for higher studies and some people switched to jobs in the middle east. 

To sum it up, I don't regret having switched from Hotels to Retail. I understand it takes a different level of perseverance to excel at hotel while starting from scratch. I didn't have that and I was okay with that. Irrespective of what my job role is, I have decent work-life balance. I pursue my passions and hobbies. I am happy now. I have been prospering here and I have people reporting to me, so I got that going on. So I guess. Hotels and I were just not meant to be.