This Walmart’s an academy, too
LV program graduates its first set of associates
DANIEL Mcgow had never felt graduation robes on his shoulders. He had never flipped a tassel on a graduation cap or walked across a stage to receive a diploma.
But in the back of a Walmart on Boulder Highway on Tuesday, Mcgow experienced all the traditions of a graduation ceremony. He was surrounded by colleagues in blue robes and yellow sashes. His family shouted from the audience when the speaker called his name.
Mcgow was one of 75 employees graduating as the first class from Walmart’s Las Vegas Training Academy, which also celebrated its grand opening during the ceremony.
“It’s kind of overwhelming for me,” said Mcgow, who has worked at the location for three years. “I never thought this store would be in a position to be an academy store.”
The academy, at the Walmart at 5198 Boulder Highway, will train company employees moving into leadership positions, such as department managers, said Robert Teevan, the company’s regional human resources director. The academy will train employees ‘It’s
kind of overwhelming for me. I never thought this store would be in a position to be an academy store.
from 37 stores in the Las Vegas Valley, Mesquite, Pahrump and locales in Arizona and Utah.
Teevan said the first academy was started in February 2016 in Texas. The Las Vegas location is No. 137 out of 200 training centers set to open by the end of 2017.
Academies can train up to 90 associates per week, he said. The Las Vegas store has 2,500 square feet of rooms dedicated to the academy, with up to 3,000 more square feet of classrooms to be built in the future.
Teevan said the academies were created to ensure employees had proper training to address changing shopping habits.
“Our associates are going to need a different set of skills to help and serve our customers in
WALMART
South Strip strategy
When the extension is completed in late 2018, MGM Resorts will have invested $350 million over four years to expand its meeting and convention space on the Strip by a quarter to more than 4 million square feet.
The company finished a 350,000-square-foot expansion of the Mandalay Bay Convention Center last year and expects to wrap up a 200,000-square-foot expansion of Aria in February.
“Las Vegas is increasing its standing as the leading event location in the country, if not globally, and there is a valid argument for the expansions,” said David Katz, an industry analyst for Telsey Advisory Group in New York.
Attracting more and larger group meetings will help MGM Grand fill its more than 5,000 rooms. And that will have the additional benefit of supporting room rates at nearby MGM properties like Luxor, Excalibur and New York-new York, Dominguez said.
When MGM Grand has to discount prices to fill rooms, it forces other resorts to cut prices, he said.
Football field-sized ballroom
While 80 percent of group meetings at MGM Resorts properties have fewer than 100 attendees, the fastest-growing segment is meetings with 1,000 or more attendees, said Ernest Stovall, vice president for sales at MGM Grand. That is helping drive the demand for more and larger space.
The MGM Grand expansion will consist of a 49,000-square-foot ballroom, nearly the size of a football field, and a 32,000-square-foot ballroom. In addition, there will be three “junior” ballrooms, Stovall said.
Pegasystems, a software developer, is among the first companies to book meetings in the yet-to-be-built space. The Boston-based company moved its annual conference to Las Vegas in 2016.
The number of attendees at its conference has risen 40 percent over the past two years to 4,100 and could reach 5,000 next year, said Michael Brenner, global vice president of customer experience and events for Pegasystems.
The MGM Grand expansion will enable Pegasystems to continue to keep its conference “under one roof,” said Brenner, who donned a hard hat and neon vest to help Dominguez and Stovall toss the first gravel.
New tech contract
MGM Grand expects guest room nights to rise 6 percent this year following a 17 percent increase last year, Stovall said.
The growth this year will be helped by a contract MGM Resorts recently signed with a technology company to bring as many as 30,000 people to Las Vegas in November. Stovall declined to disclose the name of the technology company.
In February, MGM Resorts signed a multi-year contract with Microsoft to host the company’s annual events, which will bring as many as 30,000 people to the city in July.
MGM Resorts is hoping to use the expansion to trim its heavy dependence on technology-related group meetings and attract more association business — such as the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants — which is more resilient in economic downturns.
“With our expansion, we need to aggressively go out after association business that we can put on the books in 2020,” said Stovall.
MGM Grand will hire five more salespeople to help do that, said Stovall.
Contact Todd Prince at tprince@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0386. Follow @toddprincetv on Twitter.