Earlier this week I was invited to present to the Undergraduate and Postgraduate students of Sheffield Hallam University on the topic of “Global Competencies in Hospitality”.

This was part of their one day programme which was held at the local Novotel Hotel on “Pursuing a Global Career”.  The day started with a keynote speech on “Are you Employer Ready?” and then after lunch the students were split in to their specialist subject areas where I led my workshop for the Hospitality, Events, Tourism and Food students. I always love presenting to students as it is great to see how passionate they are about the hospitality industry, and as they are our future managers, employers should take up every opportunity they have to engage with them. As we were going through the workshop one of the competencies we looked at was being able to communicate effectively in another language and it was wonderful to see that in the audience all the students had a second language, some had a third language and one individual was learning a fourth language! If you are wondering which languages you should be learning to get ahead with a global career then I will reveal the top five languages currently are: Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi and Arabic.

After a second workshop I was then part of a judging panel when six students delivered a one minute pitch on “What makes a  Global Graduate”. What was really encouraging about this was that several of the students that pitched had picked up on some of the points we had discussed earlier. The students then had another workshop from the Careers team at the University before the day was brought to a close.