Hospitality graduates find work
Tourism industry starts to recover from pandemic
As the COVID pandemic took hold in March 2020, Valerie Contreras lost her jobs as a Disney hotel concierge and server at a Kissimmee restaurant, both within five days.
Like her fellow students at UCF’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management, 25-year-old Contreras from Mesa, Ariz., worried about the future of the hospitality industry and her career prospects within it.
She returned to her restaurant job a few months later, even taking on managerial and administrative work, but she lost her free tuition through Disney World’s Aspire program after the company suspended it. By spring 2021, she wondered how to pay for the rest of her senior year, and whether she should stay with hospitality, as she approached graduation in December.
“It was really bleak, and it just felt like I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I was getting really frustrated because I was like, ‘Do I just change my major?’ ”
Contreras paid for most of her fall semester through financial aid and grants. In June, she won a $25,000 scholarship from TV chef Guy Fieri, designed to help “the next generation of restaurant owners” pursue their goals during the pandemic, and it gave her enough to finish her education and start her career
“It gave me that light that I needed to stay with hospitality,” she said.
In October, she landed a year-long salaried internship with the Four Seasons Hotel in Atlanta through networking at Rosen. She starts it later this month.
Although the hospitality sector of the U.S. economy is experiencing a hiring spike, jobs remain well below pre-pandemic levels, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show. The sector added 53,000 jobs in December — 1.2 million below what it was in February 2020 before the pandemic.
Despite that, the 315 undergraduate students who graduated from Rosen in December reported around a 95% expected employment rate by their commencement. For many of these recent alumni, the hiring figures inspire hope, reflecting recovery in an industry initially devastated by COVID19.
“There’s a lot of opportunity right now for anyone chasing a career in this path because everybody’s so short-staffed,” said Maddie Hollifield, a fall 2021 Rosen graduate.
‘Tremendous opportunity’
Industry experts agree that hospitality students are graduating into a favorable job market, despite uncertainties caused by the pandemic.
“It is a time of turbulence, but it’s a time of tremendous opportunity,” said Geoff Luebkemann, senior vice president of the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association.
“The normal pipeline of developing talent in our businesses, both from the food and the lodging side, have been disrupted, and that’s going to create a ton of opportunity for younger folks to move up the chain quicker.”
For 23-year-old Hollifield, the pandemic allowed her to gain leadership experience. She said her mental health “took a huge hit” when she was furloughed from her club concierge job at Disney’s Contemporary Resort in March 2020, but she got another job at Earls Kitchen + Bar and was promoted from a server to event manager and later day manager, she said.
“It gave me a lot of really great leadership and work experience that I wouldn’t have gotten if I wouldn’t have been furloughed,” she said.
Researcher and UCF professor Robertico Croes predicts the hospitality industry labor shortage could continue for two to three years.
Croes co-authored a report on the state of employment in the sector, published in October. His team of researchers evaluated the pandemic’s effect on hospitality workers and found it would likely lead to a “long-term labor supply shortage,” with employment down by a third from pre-COVID numbers.
“There’s some disappointment with the industry because they were were disposed of so quickly, without [employers] really taking into account their individual situation,” Croes said.
The researchers further found the industry could lose more workers if it doesn’t address quality of life issues such as low pay, high turnover and a lack of work-life balance.
Since the report’s publication, Croes said its findings have been further confirmed as workers — particularly those in lower levels of the profession — continue to quit. Over a million people left hospitality in November alone, at a rate more than double that of most other industries, national data show.
Recent graduates can help improve the industry as they fill those gaps, he said.
“As future leaders of the hospitality industry, [they can] seize this opportunity to be innovative and to think about a new business model,” he said.
Alan Fyall, associate dean of academic affairs at Rosen, said the employment figures for fall 2021 graduates have been “excellent.” He said the college’s data shows recent graduates are working around 30 hours per week, on average.
Additionally, 60% of them are working for companies they interned with while at Rosen, he said. Though about 15% to 20% of students have taken internships outside hospitality during the pandemic, the “significant majority” of those students returned to it, Fyall said.
“They really want to do it. It’s not a, ‘I don’t know what I want to do. I’ll study hospitality,’ ” he said. “... Their passion is really hospitality, so that’s great to see.”
‘The best industry’
Rosen’s recent graduates said most of their classmates are employed in hospitality post-graduation, with many working for Disney or Universal. Others have gone on to graduate school, and a “handful” has found work in other jobs, recent alumna Nicole Medina-Ulpino said.
Medina-Ulpino, 28, is still looking for a job but is dedicated to working in Orlando hospitality. She has applied for about 30 positions after graduating and only recently got her first call back, she said.
“It seems like they’re taking a little longer now to hire people,” she said.
It’s hard to know what jobs are looking for when they don’t respond to her applications, she
said.
“I feel like I have to keep rewording my resume so the company can feel more comfortable calling me,” Media-Ulpino said. “So as of right now, I feel kind of overwhelmed.”
Medina-Ulpino, like Contreras, eventually hopes to open her own business in Orlando. Medina-Ulpino wants to open a restaurant and someday own a resort, and Contreras hopes to run a cafe.
Disney called Hollifield back to work part-time last September.
She was promoted to full-time two days after graduation and plans to stay in hospitality, with the dream of one day leading a Disney theme park.
“If you love people, it’s the best industry to be in,” Hollifield said. “It’s a lot of long hours and a lot of holidays and weekends, but it’s the best decision I’ve ever made, and it’s one of, if not the most, rewarding careers.”