Welcome to the
third edition of RTO7’s staff picks of the month as we share our experiences and recommendations of the courses offered on Typsy, the on-line training platform that is available free-of charge to those that work in tourism in BruceGreySimcoe. The training is open to all levels of employers and employees – business owners, managers, full-time and part-time staff, and seasonal employees. After you’ve read about our choices below, we encourage you to try Typsy out for yourself and to share this awesome training tool with your staff and co-workers.
Learn more about Typsy, the Typsy Employee Incentive Program and how to register - for free! - on the
Typsy page.
Bill Sullivan, CEO, RTO7 / BruceGreySimcoe
Typsy Pick of the Month: Teamwork Fundamentals
Total Course Length: 39 minutes
One of the solutions to the labour shortage is a strong team. Creating and nurturing a strong team leads to so many positive outcomes including job satisfaction and staff staying with you during difficult times. This course lays the groundwork for creating the team, identifying obstacles, and providing solutions. This course will reinforce a lot of the things you are already doing but every once in a while, it will make you sit back and consider your current management techniques. It is never too old to learn or to have your knowledge tested. This course will give you an idea on how to improve your team.
More About Bill
Bill Sullivan is the CEO of Regional Tourism Organization 7, BruceGreySimcoe. Bill has over 40 years in senior management roles within the hospitality and tourism industry in rural Ontario. Bill’s operational experience during previous booms, recessions, emergencies, pandemics is assisting the industry on its road to recovery. Bill is responsible for strategic planning and operations of the organization. Prior to joining RTO7, Bill held progressive management positions over a 30-year career in resort operations. Bill received his education in the Hospitality and Tourism program at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University).
Alex Hogan, Project & Administration Manager, RTO7 / BruceGreySimcoe
Typsy Pick of the Month: Managing Team Performance
Total Course Length: 44 minutes
Especially in today’s climate with recruitment challenges at the forefront, retention of skilled staff, including the ability to manage a diversity of generations with widely differing needs is key. Strong leadership skills go a long way towards achieving this – being able to recognize the leadership potential in everyone and empowering all employees to be their best selves and ambassadors of your organization and the tourism industry. It’s a reminder that we need to rely on one another’s strengths and encourage staff to take on increased ownership and responsibility, with the knowledge they’re supported if and as needed. This course covers things such as the importance of consistency, formal and informal reviews with employees, the benefits of e-learning and of a communications strategy. Favourite quote: “The single biggest flaw in communication is the illusion it has taken place” – George Bernard Shaw Classic ;)
More About Alex
Alex Hogan is the Program & Administration Manager at RTO7 and has over 20 years’ experience managing a wide variety of projects. Alex brings strong communication and organizational skills to projects to meet the needs and objectives of partners and projects. She manages the Partnership Program, as well as contributing to sustainable tourism and workforce development projects. Prior to RTO7, Alex managed training projects for a Toronto based environmental consulting company specializing in waste management and climate change issues. She graduated from Environment and Resource Studies at the University of Waterloo.
Ginny Henry, Communication Coordinator, RTO7 / BruceGreySimcoe
Typsy Pick of the Month: Introduction to Leadership
Total Course Length: 37 minutes
There are so many useful takeaways packed into this quick and concise 37-minute course, it’s super hard to choose just one. If I had to pick any, it would be this: that everyone, no matter what their job role or title, is a leader. The course emphasizes that leadership isn’t confined to those in managerial positions – it applies to all roles within all types of businesses. Strong leadership is an ongoing process and presenter Alicia Brown emphasizes that a great (as opposed to good) leader NEVER stops learning and continues to grow and develop over the course of their career. Great leadership takes practice and it’s a role that anyone can achieve as Alicia believes we are all leaders in our own right. The course also comes with a handy, downloadable activity manual filled with questions and exercises to help course participants achieve their goal. Highly recommend this one!
More About Ginny
Ginny Henry is the Communication Coordinator at Regional Tourism Organization 7 / BruceGreySimcoe. Her career in the tourism industry started from the “bottom up”, with a summer job cleaning toilets and rooms at a family-run motel in Port Elgin, Ontario just over 40 years ago. Many of her job choices were inspired by the words, “it’s something I’ve always wanted to do”, with a strong focus on customer service, tourism, event organization and small business support. Her role at RTO7 includes social media, overseeing the seasonal partnership/image campaigns, newsletters, website content and pretty much anything communication-related that crops up. Ginny has a Bachelor of Journalism degree from Carleton University in Ottawa.
Kim Clarke, Manager, Stakeholder Relations RTO7 / BruceGreySimcoe
Typsy Pick of the Month: Bartending for Beginners
Total Course Length: 30 minutes
Have you ever wanted to impress your friends and family with an amazing tasting cocktail? Then, Bartending for Beginners is a great course for you. This course teaches about the tools and tricks of the trade, shows you the difference between different types of cocktails and how to serve them properly. One of my favourite parts of this course is the conversation about bartending being a legitimate career choice that can take you anywhere in the world. This might be your first introduction towards an amazing new career.
More About Kim
Kim Clarke is the Manger, Stakeholder Relations at Regional Tourism Organization 7, BruceGreySimcoe. Kim has spent over 15 years in the tourism industry working in destination development and management. She works closely with a variety of stakeholders to help them create amazing new experiences, managing visitation and works to find solutions to the workforce crisis. Kim is the lead for the experience and workforce development files at RTO7. She received her formal education, Bachelor of Business Administration from Wilfrid Laurier University.
Allison Davies, Communication Assistant, RTO7 / BruceGreySimcoe
Typsy Pick of the Month: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Total Course Length: 36 minutes
Join Dr Debra Blair for this approximately 30-minute introduction to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the workplace. As Blair explains, we are in need of leaders and people who can see the world from many different points of view. This course gives insight into how DEI can bring financial benefits, foster innovation and enrich your workplace culture. After all, as a tourism operator, your guests can be from all over the world, so having staff from all over the world makes sense. This course served as a great introduction to thinking about my own unconscious and implicit bias with suggestions about how to challenge those beliefs and set aside the actions that don’t serve us well. I appreciated that Blair was insistent that DEI is a long-term process and a work in progress; not a one-time, one-size-fits-all solution. The Maya Angelous quote that finishes the course is perfect—“In diversity there’s beauty and there’s strength.” I would recommend this course to anyone who’d like to begin thinking about diversity, equity and inclusion in their workplace and in their life.
More About Allison
Allison Davies is a writer, photographer and content creator who has worked for Regional Tourism Organization 7 in the Communication Assistant role for 5 years. As a trained photojournalist, she worked for many local DMOs on both writing and photography projects before joining the RTO7 team full time. Today she uses those skills to help support tourism operators by marketing the region through social media and web content. She has an English Literature degree from McGill University and a Photojournalism Diploma from Loyalist College. In her free time, Allison loves to shoot sports and continues to write for several magazines on a freelance basis.
Amanda Pausner, Experience & Administration Coordinator, RTO7 / BruceGreySimcoe
Typsy Pick of the Month: Health and Wellbeing in Hospitality
Total Course Length: 52 minutes
Mental health is everything! Everything is mental health!
Careers in the hospitality industry are fast paced, involve varying hours, putting on your customer service face and all of this can lead a high degree of stress. Laura Green, a psychotherapist who founded Healthy Pour, provides ways to manage stress levels, debunks common myths about mental health and helps you to become a workplace advocate for mental health and positively change the workplace culture to support colleagues and employees within. She also has you consider the term ‘Life-Work’ balance, as opposed to the other way around. The course takes 52 minutes to complete but is broken down into 12 micro lessons for your convenience. The session is engaging and provides resources and toolkits at the end. She quotes that 80% of hospitality workers confront stress during their career and this course is one way for us to begin to acknowledge it and make healthy and positive changes.’ You can’t help others if you can’t help yourself’.
For additional supports consider visiting her organization online where you will find seminars, training, and more wellbeing resources.
More About Amanda
Amanda has worked in the tourism industry for over 23 years. She joined the RTO7 team in 2018 in her current position as Experience & Administration Coordinator. She assists with administration duties, programs offered by RTO7 and, over the last two years, has led the T3 Accelerator Coaching Program, which supports small businesses in Bruce, Grey and Simcoe Counties. Previously, she worked with Grey County Tourism for 16 years, managing operator relations and working as a media relations specialist, showcasing what the area had to offer. While taking the Tourism Management course at Georgian College, Barrie she spent her summers with the Owen Sound Transportation Company (MS Chi-Cheemaun Ferry). In her spare time, Amanda enjoys travelling with her family of four and working in her many veggie gardens.
Robyn Hewitt, Program Coordinator, RTO7 / BruceGreySimcoe
Typsy Pick of the Month: Leading and Motivating Teams
Total Course Length: 36 minutes
Our team often talk about employee retention in the workforce as being the most important factor in minimizing challenges resulting from the current workforce crisis. Along with compensation, flexibility, additional training, and opportunity for growth, if you have the tools and resources to keep your existing team happy and motivated, even in a seasonal role, they will keep coming back. An important component of employee retention is how managers lead and motivate teams. This course talks about the importance of managing people vs. tasks, outlines the common causes of a dysfunctional team, and describes how to reduce negative behavior and conflict to strengthen the team dynamic. How do you determine and communicate team goals? Are they measured, tracked, and most importantly, rewarded? There is a lot of information provided in this course and it may be best absorbed lesson by lesson. The great thing about Typsy is that you can do just that by committing just a few minutes at a time. I highly recommend this course for managers and aspiring leaders.
More About Robyn
Robyn joined RTO7 as the Program Coordinator in August 2021 and brings a diverse background with almost 20 years of experience in various capacities of sales, marketing, and partnership development in the hospitality and tourism industry. Much of her experience is within the hotel sector where she specialized in the leisure travel trade, selling multiple properties within the Marriott family of brands. She has experience in creating integrated sales and marketing strategies and has managed the digital marketing for a large urban hotel. Robyn oversees the RTO7 Implementation Programs (OIP, SIP, RIP), as well as the administration of the Typsy training platform. She received a Business Commerce Degree in Hospitality & Tourism Management at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) and completed a Certificate of Digital Marketing Management through the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto.
Check out Typsy for yourself! Register now by visiting the Typsy page.