Spending five years in a Vietnamese university studying about accounting and finance was probably not a bad decision. I enjoyed what I learned, but if you ask if I ever planned to work in this field, the answer is probably ‘no’. I sticked with accounting and finance till the end thinking that my family would be happy and proud, but throughout my study, I always doubted if I would want to spend my life dealing with numbers.Â
Started with Care
The first job I got when I was about to graduate from the university was a customer care team lead for a small English centre in Vietnam. I was a student there when this job opportunity for a customer care associate position came up. After taking on this role, I also started to cover reception and then became an assistant director. Even though it was a lot of tasks that I took on, I was happy every single day coming to work because I got to do everything I loved, and I felt that all my skills were utilized to the highest level. I took care of all students, teachers and other OMG staff: from arranging English level assessments, consulting students with suitable courses and helping them with registration, surprising students and teachers on their birthdays, to giving extra English tutoring to students who were in need. Aside from daily tasks, I was in charge of hosting and decorating all the events at OMG including our Grand Opening, Summer Party, Halloween and Christmas parties (paper pompoms, backdrop and DIY accessories everyone was wearing in the pictures were my products! 😄 ). I also helped manage and create contents for OMG’s appearance on social media. Plus, I joined every single activities and charity events that the centre involved.
Working at OMG was the best first job I could ever imagine. I enjoyed it every single minute for the following six months until the moment I left.Â
My Tourism Journey
Leaving OMG to pursue an intensive full-time French course, I started a part-time job as a motorbike tour guide because I didn’t want to lose my English. And I discovered my love for tourism from here. I could not describe how much I felt excited before every single tour about who I would meet, what I would talk to them about, and what they would say about my city, my country and what they would share with me about their countries or other places that they had been to.
This job made me realize so much about myself and tourism, and I decided to step further into this fascinating field. In July 2015, I was offered a full-time job in a prestigious Vietnamese destination marketing company – EVIVA Tour Vietnam – as a travel consultant who had expertise in providing foreign customers with Vietnamese Visa-related services. At EVIVA, I assisted customers mainly through emails and phone calls as I was in charge of the company’s 8 visa service retail websites and hotline. My daily tasks were to process customers’ visa-on-arrival online bookings, answer their enquiries regarding Vietnamese visas, and give them advice on how to choose the right visa type for their visits. From time to time, we also had customers visiting our office in person. Along with the daily visa assignments, I also wrote articles about updates on Vietnamese visa policies as well as tourism in Vietnam in general, and I helped marketing team to respond positively to comments and inquiries that are related to Vietnamese visas on TripAdvisor.
Working at EVIVA was about putting the best effort in providing customers with the best experience of visiting Vietnam, and along with that, it is also about creating an enjoyable working environment that our colleagues would feel excited coming to work every single day. Aside from making sure that guests’ applications are processed smoothly and their enquiries are responded instantly, we also made sure that we had fun at work. It was my pleasure to run a casual ‘Baking Class’ where I showed my colleagues how to make some simple desserts that did not require complicated baking tools and knowledge, and at the end of the day, we had some treats for a hard working day.Â
The work ethic and culture of EVIVA have grown to become so important to me that I bring them with me on my journey to where I am today.Â
Stepping into the Hospitality Industry
As part of my internship course of the MA in Tourism Management program, I chose to step into the hospitality industry with the position of a hotel room attendant at the Inn at Laurel Point – a charming, elegant hotel with gorgeous water view that located at the heart of Victoria – as I believe that housekeeping is the core of a hotel. Below is a video I made for my internship course as an introduction of my internship position to my course instructor and other classmates.
The main task of a room attendant is, of course, cleaning guest rooms. As I told people “I’m a housekeeper”, many of them replied “I don’t think I would learn anything from housekeeping”. I myself do believe that one can only learn when they think they will learn; in fact, I have learned a lot more than I expected – from how to arrange cleaning assignments in a timing manner to coordinate with my leaders in order to prioritize rooms that are on request. The job may not sound complicated – many people think that it’s ‘just cleaning rooms’ – but I did have a very hard time at the beginning to meet with the job requirements, especially how to manage my time in each room so that I can complete all assignment within the time frame of a working shift. Throughout the whole summer, I tried many different ways to improve my performance; at the end, I have finally overcome the struggles by building my own efficient routine.
So what did housekeeping teach me? Yes, I learned how to clean rooms, but in the meantime, I learned not to take things for granted. Housekeeper’s job is not complicated, nor it is easy. It takes time and physical effort, and also good thinking to bring a used room to a ‘clean’ status within a limited time frame. On the other hand, it was a great opportunity to see what practices work well for the department and what needs to be improved that had not been seen. I was really lucky and happy that leaders at the Inn at Laurel Point were always open to listen to my concerns and took my suggestions for an even more productive, sustainable and healthy workplace into account.