Do the boardroom shuffle!

Many travel companies have been responding to the trading conditions by looking not just at cost, but at talent in the business. There has been no time more important than now to have the best brains, ideas and talents at board and management level. We literally need to think ourselves out of recession – coming up with new ways to make money. Some of the old ways will simply not work for many.
In this new environment, there have been board room casualties whilst companies strive to create their crack management team. This ironically has also created lots of new opportunities for executives to join new boards as companies seek out the best talents they can find that are right for them.

Leisure companies have been doing the most shuffling it would appear – such as hotels, tour operators, travel technology companies and airlines. However business travel remains to be the most static in terms of job movement.

It is essential that companies find the crème dela crème of sales people and we have seen a jump in roles for Head of Sales, Head of E-Commerce, Contracting Managers and Marketing Managers. These roles drive the sales activities of business and it is essential to switch your thinking from having a cost problem, to having a sales problem – How can we gain market share in this climate? How can we make better margins? What additional products/ services can we sell? How can we retrain our sales force to be more proactive? It’s not surprising our sister company www.onlinetraveltraining.com , which hosts easy and cheap to create, destination and product training for over 16,000 agents to access and learn is doing very well in this climate.

It is also interesting that some displaced executives have decided to try Consulting for the first time and work on interim projects or non-exec advisory roles. New Frontiers have put together an HR Club to help provide advice to HR Managers and Directors/ Owners about managing people in this climate. We have created a bank of New Frontiers Consultants for our clients to tap into board room expertise at a fraction of the cost of employing a full time Director. This is proving very popular.

So if you have been displaced, do not feel discarded. It is likely that another company really needs your expertise to help them prosper. The boardroom shuffle is about finding the right skills set and talent for this climate and so your expertise may simply be better suited to other sectors or businesses. The job market is not surprisingly highly competitive now and so it is essential that you can list key achievements, talents and skills clearly and concisely and can demonstrate optimism, enthusiasm and new ideas to help move companies forward at interview. Recessions are highly creative, so let your juices flow, rise to the challenge and dance to the boardroom shuffle!

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