Receptionist & IHG Apprentice
Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG Crowne Plaza)

Mark J

0.00.00 My name is Mark J and I’m a Receptionist and an IHG apprentice. My role as Receptionist involves me checking in and checking out, working a variety of different hours, dealing with guest queries. I’m also an IHG apprentice which means I’m a potential Manager in the future and as such the company has funded training for me over an 18 month period of which I’ve only just recently graduated.

0.00.30 When I was at school I had dyslexia. I find that I find things difficult or different to interpret. The way that I have found to manage my dyslexia is being open and honest with people who are around me, be it my colleagues, my Managers, just having the honesty to go up to them and say can they reword that, can they show it to me different, present it to me a different way. Luckily I was managed to have one to one teaching.

0.01.00 Mainly the skills that I excelled in was design technology working in textiles. I think it was a very practical lesson for me and that’s where I managed to get my A in GCSE’s, all my other GCSE’s I got Cs and Ds, but it was mainly the practical element of my GCSE’s that I excelled in, which is why I enjoy reception so much because it is very much practical based and checking people in, also using the computer, but practically doing things for them. When I left school I decided, I had many options to me.

0.01.30 I decided to go to be a silver service waiter full-time and in my part-time to work for a media company and from working as a silver service waiter got a lot of money to enable me to fund my sort of part-time work. Working at the BBC was something I really wanted to do at the time. It was interesting. It was something, it was conversational topic amongst my friends. It was practical, practical working in a studio, practical meeting guests.

0.02.00 I felt after a while because I wasn’t paid, it was voluntary work, I had to fund myself and funding myself was working in the hotel. The reason why I disbanded the idea of working in the media is it involved a lot of hours and a lot of travelling in my own time and it took a three or four hour journey to get from where I lived in Birmingham to London and I felt that it was a short term career and I felt that working on reception in hotels was a long term career goal. And so the turning point would be the financial point where I sort of basically ran out of money to fund my sort of hobby of working in the media.

0.02.30 And my, I ran out of money funding, funding myself and my parents got to a point after two years of doing it that they said I needed to find a proper job. So it was my parents that sort of pushed me into the sort of hospitality industry. My General Manager has inspired me by enable me to go onto courses and to ask me if I wanted to go on courses and to ask me to give feedback and to, also to hear her story on how she got to where she is today, to be able to gain from her her knowledge and her understanding of the industry.

0.03.00 In the next five year time I would see myself as a Reception Manager for a very small hotel then moving on, say two or three years from there to be an Operations Manager in a bigger property to the future, about 15 years time to be a General Manager, have overall control of a hotel property.

0.03.30 One of my interests outside of work is working for a local newspaper where I get to go and do different things, be it launch of something new, a new bar or a new theatre production and I get to review it. So even though several years ago I was dead set in working in the media, several years later I still am in a way but it’s not my full-time job, it’s something I do as a hobby and I still enjoy it.

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