And the winner is – everyone of you!

Author Martina KnitterMentoring Team AICR Switzerland

This year the mentoring team was asked to support four candidates during their preparation for this year’s AICR Competition Switzerlands Best Receptionist.

These four candidates had participated at the Swiss Skills in Bern September 2022. In order to acknowledge their achievements as well as providing them the oppertunity to develop further from the feedback received, the Hotel & Gastro Union Switzerland supported them in order to fulfill all the necessary requirements.

Alissa, Carmen, Naibi and Nicolas had unfortunately no AICR Manager to support them;  guide them through the preparation process. No one to assist with tips, hints or just general information. And no one beeing by their side on competition day.

In our eyes without this support none of them would have had a fair chance in the competition,  considering also their young age and short working experience (the max age requirements Swiss skills are 21 years)

For the mentoring Team this would mean to firstly find a supporting Hotel for Alissa as she meanwhile had finished her apprenticeship and is back to school for further studies.

It was infact an easy task to find for her a Hotel that was very pleased to offer her further trainings and provided financial support. I was very happy to see that the Managment of the Parkhotel Winterthur immediately made themselves available to assist a young talent and invest in our next generation of hospitality employees.

Next step was assisting in their application process with reading through CV’s, adding to their application letter or commenting on Video presentations skills.

In our first of five one to one Zoom calls we discussed the key learnings of the Swiss Skills analysing strength and areas of development from their Feedback.

In the following calls we discussed expectations, made practical excercises for the role play as well as the written exam and completing the hour with working on mental strength to prepare for the competition day.

Needless to say that it was a great pleasure working with all of them: taking the feedback on board and improving their skills enormously in this short time.

During the competition in Interlaken including the preparation training they had the chance to further built on their strengths. They easily formed a great group of youngsters with all the other 8 candidate’s,  all very talented, motivated and kind to each other.

The results and winners have been published and are meanwhile well know, but I would like to point out that all four of our mentees have made great sucess and can be very proud if their performance.

 

At the Gala Dinner before the winner announcement:

Jordan Kestle- Hotel & Gastro Union Luzern

Egidio Marcato- Chief Coach Swiss Skills

Martina Knitter- Mentoring Team

Naibi Duttweiler

Alissa Badertscher

Carmen Többen

Nicolas De Peri

 

Even though only two of you are on the Podium, you all have taken something great from it!

The universe is not always giving you what you want but what you need.

 

 

 

There will be more news and feedback from the candidates in my next article in December- so keep reading or send me an email if you are interested in our service of preparing for a competition.