Long term life skills you can get from a ski season

Working a ski season can teach you some incredibly valuable life lessons in just a few short months. You probably won’t even realise you’re learning either because you’ll be busy having a blast and enjoying yourself. But when it matters later down the line, you might just be doffing your cap to the time you spent in the mountains for giving you the edge you needed to succeed.

Here's 8 life skills you can learn during a ski season:

1. Taking yourself out of your social comfort zone

Plunging yourself head-first into a job you’ve never done before, away from your home and family can be very daunting. You will have to make new friends, and quick. Luckily all new seasonaires are in the same boat, plus there’s lots of veterans to show you the ropes. You’ll get very good at the smile and ‘hello’ that gets a conversation started.

2. Getting to know people

After you’ve mastered the initial meet and greet, the next skill you’ll learn from working in the mountains is building a rapport with people. You’ll get on great with your colleagues, but every week you’ll have a new group of guests to get to know. It’s amazing how many friends you can make in these short weeks but talk to most seasonaires and they’ll tell you they have guests who stay in touch with them year after year. This skill in building rapport quickly will be priceless when it comes to your career in the future.

3. Helping and supporting others

We all have our tough times and many of us are too proud to say we need a bit of TLC. A ski season can be lonely if you get homesick but you just have to look around you to feel better. You have a family of co-workers who will do anything to make you laugh and feel better. Without realising it, you’ll develop the skills to help your colleagues too – reading the signs that someone isn’t on top of the world, providing an ear or a shoulder for them, and helping them out the other side when they’re back on top of their game again.

4. Self reflection

With such a quick turnover of guests and an often competitive nature between staff in resort to be the best, you’ll quickly learn how to analyse your performance in order to achieve. You’ll become more accepting of criticism, able to improve quickly and have a greater appreciation of analysis. Ultimately you’ll get it down to an art form, learning from the bad weeks and replicating the actions of the good ones in order to succeed.

5. Cope in new environments

When an opportunity presents itself in the future, it might not be exactly where you want it to be. You have to be able to see the woods for the trees sometimes, and working a ski season can definitely help. It can be cold, dark, hectic, tiresome, frenetic and stressful. But then you take a breath and pick your head up to see those incredible mountains and it all makes sense. Learning to cope in a new environment is about finding a positive in every situation and being a seasonaire has that in abundance.

6. Taking on responsibilities

It won’t always be plain sailing on a season. Ask anyone who’s done it and they’ll tell you about the time they had to rep a transfer coach with no training, or got up early to cook breakfast at a chalet with no kitchen experience. Whatever the story, the outcome was the same: Get the job done. The seasonaire mentality will teach you the benefit of being responsible for your own job, but also to rise to the occasion when the team depends on it.

7. Organising your workload

The law of the Seasonaire Holy Trinity comes into play here, and you will remember it forever. If you can balance work, skiing and partying you will be the zen master seasonaire. Most people let one of three slip by the wayside but striking a perfect balance will get you the best powder days, the most efficient shifts at work and you’ll never miss a great night out. When you look back at age 40 you’ll realise how useful achieving the holy trinity really was!

8. How to transfer your skills to a career

When the time comes for you to hang up your Skiworld uniform you can be sure that you’ve assembled an unparalleled quiver of skills. You’ll be ready to kick the door down of a budding employer and have them begging you to take their job within minutes. It happens.But first you need to know how to apply those skills, and that’s where your Skiworld management team come in. All ski season veterans themselves, they have the inside track on how to transfer your skills to another industry. Don’t miss the opportunity to get their advice.

Of course, probably the best way to apply your ski season skills to a future career is take a stepping-stone via the Skiworld head office in London. We are always looking for energetic and passionate professionals to join our team of sales people, recruiters and marketers. Take a look at our recruitment page and see what’s available: https://www.skiworld.co.uk/recruitment

See you on first lifts!