Northland Student Advisors Gain Valuable Industry Insight

International Travel College’s Account Manager Ceri Jenkins and Short Course Team Leader Mel Verwijmeren recently ran a personal development day to help those advising Northland students to gain closer contact with their local travel and tourism industry. The day was a forerunner to the short course team hitting the road again to run its Tourism, Adventure and Flight Attending Short Courses for Northland students during Term Two. (more…)

ITC Gives Northland Students a Taste of the Action

A new initiative from International Travel College (ITC) gives students from outside the main centres the chance to experience the opportunities available in the airline, travel and tourism industries.

“We are very aware that there are high school students around the country who simply don’t have the access to training opportunities that students in the larger cities have,” says ITC’s Marketing Director Claire Huxley.

“It’s not just a lack of training institutions in those areas, but there are few chances for students to even explore whether they are interested in pursuing a particular field of study.”

To combat this, ITC recently provided its two-day Flight Attending Short Course to students in Northland.

“We contacted all the high school careers advisors in the area,” says Claire, “and they were absolutely thrilled to be able to offer this to their students. We also have a great relationship with Fullers and we contacted them to see if they could help us out.”

Fullers Great Sites offered its vessel ‘Tongariro’, to stand in for the aircraft cabin for the full two days of the course.

ITC’s Short Course Tutor Mel Verwijmeren ran the course. She provided students with practical role-play experience using onboard equipment, and taught them skills related to in-flight service, safety demonstrations, evacuations and how to deal with passengers’ specific needs.

An added bonus of running the course onboard a ship, says Mel, was how transferable those skills are from airline travel to the open ocean.

“The students learnt about the entry level roles onboard these vessels, giving them a greater understanding of what further education was needed to step into such roles.”

“And thanks to Barry, the Operations Manager of Fullers Great Sites, our students got a real taste of what the travel and tourism industry has to offer, as we visited local tourist attractions the R-Tucker Sail Boat, Dolphin Explorer, Overnight Cruise Ipipiri and the Exciter, which is equipped with not one but four V8 engines!”

This first step in ITC’s new initiative has been incredibly successful, and several of the students have already enrolled with ITC for 2014, and a number were even offered work experience onboard one of the Fullers Great Site vessels.

“Mel worked incredibly hard to provide these students with the same experience students from Auckland schools get with our short courses,” says Claire. “And the feedback from teachers and students has been excellent. These students now have another option available to them, and that takes them one step closer to their dream job.”

ITC will be continuing to offer its short courses to high school students outside Auckland, with the next course to be run in Gisborne.