THE TRAINING EXPERIMENT How the Pandemic Transformed Training in the Spa Industry
BY JOSH CORMAN
JCTI certificate earners celebrate the completion of their supervisory training with Maggie Fiorentino of the American Hotel and Lodging Educational Institute
IN MARCH OF 2020 , CAROL ROSE BROWN , director of the Jamaican Centre of Tourism Innovation ( JCTI ), sat in a hotel room in Montego Bay , Jamaica , and typed a simple query into a search engine : “ What is a pandemic ?” Earlier in the day , she had attended a meeting in Kingston , but by that evening , her other upcoming meetings and events were being postponed or canceled one after the other due to the emerging threat of COVID-19 . But Brown , who for years had led an initiative to train and certify supervisors in spas and other parts of the tourism sector , had more on her mind than a handful of canceled meetings .“ When I realized what a pandemic was — the advent of a disease for which there is no cure — I realized that this is going to require a new strategy for training ,” says Brown .“ When I got back Monday morning , I asked my team ,‘ How do we do this ? Can we put the courses online ?’ This was now an experiment .”
Though she couldn ’ t have known how long that experiment would last on that day in March , there was little doubt that quality , uniform training , particularly in the areas of disinfection and sanitation , would be a central component in any plan to weather the challenges caused by the pandemic . Brown ’ s team expanded their offerings , finding partners that could offer trainings in other areas while tackling the enormous challenge of delivering online courses that had previously only been available in person . The response , Brown notes , was staggering .“ We thought we would put up two hundred , three hundred places , but we were at four hundred people registered by the end of the first day , and by the following day , there were almost eight thousand people registered . We had to close down the site because we could not handle that many people .”
That overwhelming level of interest in training is consistent with what Nicole Kenny has seen in her role as vice president of professional & technical services at Virox , the
20 PULSE ■ MARCH 2021