Professional development is paramount when you are looking to grow a career. Working for a company that is aware of this need is essential – it provides a space to continuously develop and learn within a supportive team environment.
We spoke to Emma Maximiw, Human Resources Business Partner, about how Flight Centre works to provide professional development to Flight Centre employees – and why it matters.
Companies like Flight Centre don’t just hire people, they are people. The personal values and behaviours of team members, including what they say and do, or even how they wear their uniform and present themselves, can reflect or have an impact on the company’s identity.
We put our customers first and work hard to deliver an amazing service, but success also means looking after each other and catering to our interests. By creating an environment where employees feel they can learn, you help avoid the fear of failure, encouraging greater experimentation and innovation, and ultimately, higher performance.
When we look for employees, particularly those working in our retail branches, we look for the right people. One of the biggest determiners of a right employee is someone who fits the team – even more so than someone with a stellar resume.
The people at Flight Centre care about each other. Flight Centre embraces team members’ desire to travel and makes it easy to do so. For example, there are opportunities to transfer and alternate between branches or work with Flight Centre entities overseas.
Our Travel Consultants face an intense training period after joining Flight Centre, but even when that is over, the learning continues. We have a bevy of training programs and workshops available internally to employees to help them develop specific hard skills.
More importantly, growing employees’ soft skills are also essential. Here are the most versatile and widely necessary soft skills:
Mastering these skills gives employees the foundations they need to deliver high-level service and is essential training for the next step in employees’ growth.
Growing your retail employees’ skills also gives you an opportunity to hire internally – consider the overlap between the skills needed for customer service jobs and human resources: in both, you’re providing customer support to stakeholders on a daily basis.
There have been numerous articles describing the benefits of hiring internally, but to summarise: it allows the culture you’ve built from the top down to permeate the layers of your business from the bottom, ensuring a thorough spread of the company’s values via people who have lived and practised it.
Once an internal hire has settled into their new role, continued support is essential to keep employee job satisfaction high and to ensure they continue to actualise the core values of your business.
Flight Centre has given me the opportunity to step up into a role where I am able to apply and develop my skills and knowledge in the HR space while keeping sight of my passion for travel. The issues or concerns that our people raise with us must be dealt with in a manner that ensures dignity and respect for those involved or impacted.
As someone who enjoys working in and intends to keep on growing a career in human resources, I feel lucky to be working with a leader that encourages further development when I am ready for it.
Ready to take the first step and start growing your career? Find out more about the opportunities at Flight Centre.
