Hospitality Industry Expert Interview
Description
As an important part of your education, you need to learn about managing diversity from someone other than your instructor or course materials. Taking what you have learned and then hearing it applied to real-world situations is a learning experience that adds dimension to this class and your overall education. The focus of this assignment is to reach out to a current manager or expert and get a better understanding of ‘what it means' to manage and lead a diverse workforce within the hospitality and tourism industries. It is important for you to identify a potential expert early in the session to ensure you can complete the assignment in a timely fashion.
Instructions & Requirements
To successfully meet the requirements for this assignment as outlined in the assessment rubric, you are required to contact and talk with an expert within the area of hospitality management. An expert, by definition, is someone who has a comprehensive knowledge or skill in a particular area. This does not include your work supervisor, the manager of the local pool cleaning company, a family friend who owns a business, nor a faculty member on campus as that limits an on-the-ground perspective. This individual should be different that you (i.e. gender, race, ethnicity). You must interview an expert in the field (i.e., hospitality-related manager) and write a summary report of 2 - 3 pagesrelating what you have learned in class to what you learned from the interview concerning managing diversity. To complete the interview summary report, you will need to:
1. Ask Questions: Your interview should include, at minimum, the following questions (you will also need to develop at least three more directly related to your readings):
• What are the most important issues to consider when it comes to diversity management?
• What are two relevant examples that demonstrate situations where diversity issues have potentially become a problem within the workplace and how did you handle the problem?
• Use a current event to help provide questions.
2. Summarize Results: In the summary report, you will need to encapsulate the results of your interview and validate the selection of your expert. A summary is not the interview answers verbatim but an overview of what you have learned based upon what they said. When it comes to your additional questions, please list them in the summary as well. You will also need to outline who your expert was, why they are an expert and a summary of their careers to this point. (2-3 pages)
3. Relate Your Knowledge: In the summary report, the final component is to relate three specific items that you learned from this class to the interview and how they effectively apply diversity management practices. If you do not have enough information to accomplish this, remember that you can ask as many questions as needed to get a better understanding of diversity management from your expert. (2-3 pages).You will need to provide supporting evidence two (2) from your readings, textbook, or other resources. APA referencing is required.
Resources
In order to identify an expert, you can do several things. The first, begin reading articles about the topic and contact the authors. The second - engage with content experts on LinkedIn or other social media channels to identify appropriate experts. The third would be to seek out the general manager of your internship location and tell them about your course, as this will probably work the best. It is important that you start this process early as it may take several weeks to conduct the interview. I would suggest you confirm through your Professor if the interviewer meets the requirement of ‘different than you'. Below are a series of resources and references that will help you identify methods to reach out to consumer segmentation experts.