The Hospitality Job Trends to AVOID!
Yangon is a hub of activity in the hospitality and F&B space. The industry has been growing rapidly from the days when there were only a few quality hotels like The Strand, Traders and Inya Lake. And the only quality food you could buy was so expensive the average person couldn’t afford to eat it.
Since I have been in Yangon, a little over 2 ½; years, there has been a literal explosion of new restaurants, bars and hotels. F&B chains like KFC, Breadtalk and Harry’s Bar, hotels like Novotel, Melia, Pan Pacific and Lotte have all opened up and there are more under construction. Now with these new locations, the demand on experience hospitality professionals has increased dramatically.
For some time, the large number of jobs in hospitality were covered by returning Myanmar nationals from countries like Dubai and Thailand. Myanmar workers have often found great opportunities in these countries, learning valuable international skills that they would not have been able to learn if they stayed in Myanmar. This is no longer the case due to the large number of vacancies for hospitality professionals, and probably hasn’t been for at least 2 years now.
In Yangon when a new hotel opens, massive open days are held and hospitality professionals looking for a little better wage, a slightly higher position apply. Even if they moved to a new hotel 6 to 12 months earlier, they still want to risk moving to a new location for very little benefit over the long term. These new hotels are also not thinking about the long term when they do their hiring.
The hotels are desperate to fill their headcount targets and therefore focus on quantity and not quality. They will happily take someone who is changing jobs at every opportunity, when they should be looking at building a robust and loyal team. They seem to forget the massive costs training and staff turnover have on a business. As an agency with a specialist hospitality recruitment team, we speak to hundreds of hospitality candidates each month, and what we are starting to see more and more is that many candidates making a move to these new hotels, do not last very long and regret their decision. They moved just for salary or a promotion, but didn’t look at the hotel culture, the management, target customers and vision of the business. Long term, these things are much more important and should be the first points to consider when looking at changing jobs.
If you are in hospitality and thinking about moving to a new hotel or restaurant that opens, consider the following questions to help you avoid making a big mistake.
Have you worked at your current employer for more than 2 years?
Have you talked with your current management about your career opportunities?
Do you know what the culture of the new hotel will be?
If you answered NO to any of these questions, then you are most likely making a bad decision looking at a new job opportunity. Consider staying at your current employer, show some loyalty and think about the long-term growth opportunities. The result will be that you can AVOID the high possibility of regretting your decision and be much happier day to day and long term have much better career opportunities.