This article was contributed by Revinate’s Vice President of Marketing, Michelle Wohl, a Cornell University ’94 graduate. 

While I was taking literature and science courses in college, many of my classmates at Cornell University were taking wines and hotel operations courses. I always envied the ‘Hotelies’ because I thought they were learning marketable skills while I was risking it with a liberal arts degree.

Now that I have been in the real world for close to twenty years, I realize that you can never be totally prepared for a career. While I learned valuable writing and communications skills, I certainly wasn’t classically prepared for where my career took me. In my twenty years with technology companies, I had to adapt to the web, email, mobile applications, social media and software as a service, among other things. How could I have ever known, as a student, that my work would be shaped by these new technologies?

Likewise, my Hotelie friends undoubtedly learned important skills related to food service and accounting but likely had to pick up the skills needed to be successful in the real world, on the job or through industry resources. For example, back in 1994 there is no way they could have predicted the impact that the web or social media would have on their business, or how complicated the distribution channel would become, or that revenue management would become a critical role on property.

Since it’s unreasonable to expect college administrators and professors to predict trends and build courseware for today’s ever changing hospitality landscape, the industry must come together to help. For this reason, Revinate established a University Program, with the goal of providing student access to our software and guest lectures about trends around online reputation management and social media.

We’ve also announced a collaboration with eCornell, whereby anyone in the industry can take a free online course and become Revinate Certified. With 23,000 hotels across the world, this certification allows our customers to prove proficiency with the software and allows students to add a marketable skill to their resumes and show prospective employers that they are on top of the technology trends that will help them get ahead.

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