Before the school bell rings for summer, most of the children in Georgia public schools will be exposed to several different careers.
It’s all part of the state requirement called the College and Career Ready Performance Index, which involves K-12 students having access to several different careers in the classroom and with professionals from that industry.
The Tourism Leadership Council spends time sharing tourism with any school that asks us to be a part of a career day or classroom lesson.
Over the years, we’ve been in high schools, middle schools and even elementary schools. Last year, I visited with all third-grade students at Haven Elementary School.
It’s always exciting to take part in these adventures because it forces me to break down tourism into its most basic form: If you like people, you could work in tourism.
Because we’re nearing the end of the school year, my team at the Tourism Leadership Council gets a lot of requests to visit schools.
We love doing this — getting to share this vibrant community with students who may or may not know we exist.
For high school students, many of them have their first taste of tourism by working at a restaurant. They see first-hand ways you can move up in a restaurant.
I love using the example of Rance Jackson, general manager of The Lady & Sons. He started in the kitchen and worked his way up to leading one of Savannah’s most popular and lucrative restaurants.
For elementary students, jobs in tourism are a little harder to explain. Some students have never been on vacation or stayed in a hotel, so the concept is new.
For these grades, we show pictures of people doing their job and draw some common ground with all the pictures.
The kids pick up on this quickly. The one thing all the pictures have in common is the smile. It goes back to liking people — tourism at its most simple form. So, if you like someone, you usually smile at them.
We talk about hotel desk clerks who welcome people to stay the night in a room with a bed. We talk about chefs who prepare food in restaurants. We talk about shop clerks who help people find just what they were looking for.
Recently, my vice president, Molly Swagler, was at Juliette Low Elementary School’s career fair. Even though she talks about tourism all day every day, she had a first while she was there. She got to talk about tourism to pre-K kids. Now, that was the youngest age group we’ve ever talked to about tourism.
She asked them if they knew of anyone who worked in tourism, and their little hands shot up.
“My mom drives a trolley. My grandma works at a hotel. My cousin makes food at a restaurant,” they shouted.
It was so encouraging to see how those who work in tourism were sharing what they did when they got home.
“I shouldn’t be surprised that these pre-k kids knew all about tourism,” Swagler told me when she returned to the office. “We’re fortunate to live in a city where one in seven people work in the tourism family.”
If you would like for the Tourism Leadership Council to share more about this industry with your classroom, please tell your school counselor or teachers to contact us. We’d be delighted to share our smile.
Michael Owens is president/CEO of the Tourism Leadership Council, the largest non-profit trade organization that supports and represents the tourism community. Contact Owens at michael@tourismleadershipcouncil.com or by calling 912-232-1223.
By Michael Owens