Tour guides have always been the biggest and scarcest talents in the tourism industry. However, judging from the situation reflected by job seekers, tour guide posts are very difficult to find. What is the reason? The real situation is that the supply of tour guides in the whole tourism market exceeds the demand, but there are not many experienced full-time tour guides with tour guide qualification certificates, and even fewer tour guides who have been engaged in tour leader work for a long time, are well informed and praised by tourists.
At present, most of the tour guides are on-the-job staff and students from other industries, except for some full-time tour guides who have been formally trained and registered. Some of these part-time tour guides also hold tour guide qualification certificates, but due to lack of professional experience, the service quality cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, there will be a large shortage of tour guides every peak season.
Therefore, if you are still in the periphery of tour guide work, you can obtain a tour guide certificate, seize the recruitment peak several times a year, fully exercise your ability, accumulate good language ability, knowledge connotation and industry experience, and strive to enter a regular travel agency as a full-time tour guide. If you are already a qualified tour guide, you should practice hard and make full use of every opportunity to lead a team to be excellent. In addition, you can also participate in some tour guide competitions to enhance your ability and industry visibility.
The second step is to become a skilled tour guide.
Excellent tour guides are in short supply, especially skilled ones. At present, those who are engaged in tour guide work can learn a skill to improve their professional competitiveness. For example, overseas travel and domestic travel are becoming more and more popular, but the talents who develop various overseas travel routes and excellent domestic travel routes are very scarce. Especially with the development of outbound tourism, management talents with international knowledge vision, foreign-related tourism culture, humanized service concept in line with international practice and management experience in international tourism industry are rare. As a tour guide, you may wish to know more about the development of tourist routes, strengthen practice and lay the foundation for your career promotion.
For another example, there are very few tour guides who know Japanese, Spanish, Russian, Korean and other minor languages, and many foreign tourists who come to China need a minor language guide to lead the way. Learning a foreign language can add many bright colors to your career. It is reported that the demand of international departments of some large travel agencies for small-language tour guides is "how much training, how much underwriting", and some foreign travel agencies have quietly begun to compete for foreign language tour guides.
For another example, at present, 60% of travel agencies urgently need to plan and send talents. If you are a tour guide, you can also learn about the development of new routes, accommodation negotiations, itinerary arrangements, cost accounting and so on. And you are expected to become the core talent of the travel agency.
The third step is to become an all-round senior tourism talent.
Tour guide work is only the tip of the iceberg of the huge tourism industry, and there are many work directions extending from it. Shanghai's successful bid to host the 20 10 World Expo will give birth to a huge "service industry chain", which is a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity and a challenge for tourism workers. Experts predict that the future tourism market will be a versatile world.
For domestic enterprises, at present, the requirements of travel agencies for tour guides have been upgraded from simple full-time escort and local escort to designing tourist routes, which has created a higher entry threshold for tour guides and made the tour guide profession more irreplaceable.
As for foreign-funded tourism companies, tourism companies in Britain, Japan and other countries have set foot in the domestic tourism industry, launched a variety of unique tourism products to seize the market, and are also competing for domestic excellent tourism talents, such as senior experts and management talents with many years of tourism market planning background, such as senior tourism planners, tourism consulting department managers, planning project directors and so on. High-level tourism professionals who can cope with all kinds of complex economic situations, understand the rules of WTO operation and have strategic vision are also very scarce. These opportunities provide good career opportunities for talents in the industry, including high salaries. Even headhunters who were not interested in travel agencies before paid more attention to tourism talents. According to a media report, a manager-level "person" who has worked in a state-owned travel agency for 10 years has just been hired as the marketing director by a foreign travel agency.
The industry has higher requirements for tour guides, and there are more and more career opportunities, which gives practitioners the possibility of unlimited development. Tour guides are well-connected and can actively improve themselves through training and study, and turn themselves into professionals in short supply in the market. This is the best way to break through the career bottleneck.