Journal Entry

Student Declaration

1. Introduction

Thanks to ICMS, I got a chance to work for one of the most largest hotel chain in the world namely Sydney Harbour Marriott Hotel. This hotel is located at the heart of Circular Quay which is the hot spot for travellers in terms of Sydney Opera House, Harbour Bridge and The Rocks. Additionally, it will take only five to ten minutes’ walk to those famous icon of Australia. In term of the title, my role in this hotel is Banquet Attendant. In general, my responsibility is assisting with planning, preparation, cleaning up events and serving guests. Moreover, we also need to respond to customer’s requests, questions and complaints. Different from restaurant attendants who work only in one area every day, banquet server’s workplace will depend on each event leads to we can work at different venue each shift. As an evidence, in Sydney Harbour Marriott Hotel they have one restaurant called Silvester’s Restaurant placed at ground floor. Meanwhile, belonging to Banquet department there are ten rooms which situated in the second and third floor will be used for events and functions.

2. Body

To begin with, I will go through the process how I took this role for my work placement. At the beginning, I need to pass the interview with not only many questions about myself, my experiences and banquet role. But also, several situations have been asked from my manager about the potential problem with the guest or teammate I might face in the future. After having finished all the documents, Human Resource’s department have made a tour go around the hotel for us. Thanks to the tour, I can get to know all about Marriott such as how their room look like, how many views customer can see and the location of each department of this hotel. Hence, I have known not only my department but also others division in this hotel. Another point worth noting is that Marriott has equipped all the knowledge about the historic of Marriott family and ours’s responsibility by bringing forward the orientation and training online course for new employees.

Another factor to consider is every role has their own responsibilities leads to there are many different expectations for each title. In detail, being a banquet server, I will need to meet various expectations such as Time-management, Attention to detail and Problem-solving. I agree with the opinion that every soft skill can be learned but it can be denied that each person will have their own unique talents. Moreover, those talents also can assist people to study and develop the soft skills. With the discipline ability, I have some my own rules in for every situation and always remind myself to keep following the rule. For instance, an important rule for banquet attendant is that food always need to be ready at least fifteen minutes before the interval of the function. Thanks to my talent, I can easily learn to manage time leads to I can ensure my productivity, efficiency and decrease pressure. Additionally, I have not known that being in the habit of taking notice into the detail is a soft skill which banquet server’s need. Combination with deliberative personality has led to assist my customers several times. For example, a group of people can be allergic to some spices, or they can be vegan and gluten person so if I forgot to put the signal for the dish, it could be harm to my guests. Fortunately, my nature had helped myself to remember check the details of dishes before having served.

On the other hand, there are some employability skills which can be required for banquet attendant in the future including initiative and event planning. Because creativity can help us to avoid boring when we need to work at the same place each day. Moreover, being creative will be easily to adapt to new situation and generate a range of options. In term of event planning skill, there are many advantages for banquet servers such as they can manage time, analyse event’s information so they can priority setting timeline co-ordinate tasks for themselves and their work mate. In addition, those skills

3. Conclusion

In summary, it can be said that the commencement has a significant affection on my life. At the beginning, my feeling has been combinate animated and worried owing to this is the first time I work for banquet department leads to I am uneasy in my mind about the new role in Marriott Hotel. Subsequently, thanks to the conscientious manager who has inspired for me, I got a lot of new knowledge about the operation of Banquet department or a hotel in general. However, it only took three days for me to feel elated every time I go to work now. One reason behind this is I work very effectively in a friendly and motivative environment where colleagues always willing to help each other’s no heed to which department you work for. In addition, I have to say that I had learned several new skills which cannot get in another department, but I am still feeling comfortable with the way how I get those skills. With a supportive manager, he has sympathetic to my mistake and usually explain how I can fix the problem. As a result, I have learnt a valuable lesson which had changed my mindset is that do not fear to make mistakes because we can get a lot of lessons from ours fault.

4. Appendix

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