HUMAN RESOURCES: Professional Development Opportunities
by Leanne Floeden

Creating Momentum from Professional Development Opportunities
A professional conference provides valuable opportunities to network with peers, share ideas, and be inspired. If you attended the AHLA’s Convention & Trade Show or any other conference this year, you want to know the investment of time away from the office as well as the conference costs will be well spent. Here are some ways to optimize your experience and ensure you are getting value for your time and money:

Set goals for what you hope to come away with. Take some time before the convention to review the program and identify key learning or networking opportunities that will enhance your performance. Having a clear picture of what you hope to achieve in advance will help you to prepare any questions, which you may have in sessions, and ensure you get the most out of any networking opportunities. A goal may be learning new content or networking to find out how other professionals deal with a specific issue or challenge you may be facing at your property. 

Create a process to formally report back. Before you leave for the convention, book a meeting to report what you learned. This is another way to help keep you focused on getting the most out of the event. You may want to report back to your supervisor or to colleagues that are unable to attend. Keep this meeting in mind as you attend the sessions. It will remind you to ask how new ideas might apply at your property.

Look for ideas that will enable you to make improvements that can be tracked. Return on investment for internal training can be very challenging to track, but there are a number of other HR metrics that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a new idea. Staff turnover, especially for new employees, is a number that can easily be calculated and tracked. Keep your eyes open for ideas that can help impact employee engagement, turnover, or lost time due to injury.
Sherry Scott of the Sutton Place Hotel, Edmonton attended the 2007 AHLA convention and applied the ideas presented to her own process for bringing on new employees. According to Sherry, “After learning about the many things that Disney does for their staff, we incorporated our own Ambassador program just a couple of months later. It has not only provided new development opportunities for existing employees, it has also significantly improved our retention of new employees within their first 90 days. If it hadn’t been for the seminars at the conference, we might never have thought of such a creative new tool to engage and connect better with new hires!”

Take advantage of sessions that are outside of your regular scope. A great way to find synergies with your organization is to learn more about other components of the business. If you normally work in HR, operational sessions may spark an idea about how to apply your skills to an operational issue. There may be ideas in a consumer-focused marketing session that could be tweaked to apply to marketing for employees. 

Share ideas about your own best practices whenever you have the opportunity: Offering up the way your organization has dealt with a particular issue or problem is a way to invite other ideas and can result in creative new ideas. Taking the time to share your experiences with peers is a great way to build relationships. Sometimes it is the connection with a colleague that is the most valuable takeaway from a convention.
Whatever the professional development opportunities you undertake, we hope you are inspired to continue to provide great service in 2008!

Leanne Floden is the Vice President of Human Resource Development for the AHLA, which provides human resource consulting to the hospitality industry and offers a wide range of innovative training and development products and services. Contact the AHLA at 780-436-6112 or 1-888-436-6112.