Scholarship / Build up durable network of travel companies, tour agents, airlines representatives, hotel contacts [4]

Any remarks are appreciated. Many thanks!

Chevening networking skills question

For 1.5 years of work at my current company, I've realized that possessing and maintaining good and wide network is the most crucial factor for succeeding in my work. As an inbound tour operator company operating in b2b business model, it is vital for us to have reliable business partners - travel companies, who supplies us with tourists.

Beginning from the last year, Uzbekistan has been turning to a popular travel destination for people from various countries such as United States and Japan. Establishing useful network in these countries would help to capture a big market share. For building up and maintaining network I normally utilize email messages and telephone calls. Always being in touch with partners, even with those if I'm not currently cooperating with, contributes to keep strong relationships.

No way of maintaining a relationship can match the face to face meeting. So our company partakes on the biggest travel fairs, exhibitions and shows in Europe and Asia. These events are a perfect chance to find new partner as well as to meet with old ones. Believing in my ability of properly establishing networks, our director always takes me with himself to such kind of events. For the last year I've taken a part on big travel exhibitions such as Top Resa in Paris, TTG in Rimini and JATA in Tokyo. Especially, trip to Japan was the most successful - apart from Tokyo, I visited Osaka, Nagoya and Sapporo, where my travel agent introduced me local outbound travel companies. As a result of these meetings, we are expecting significant increase in flow of Japanese tourists to Uzbekistan next year.

My job helped me to build up durable network of travel companies, tour agents, airlines representatives, hotel contacts and friends in countries such as Japan, Italy, France as well as Central Asian region. Since I have decided to continue my studies in tourism sphere, I'm sure these contacts will be useful for me and other Chevening students by sharing their invaluable experience and knowledge.

Scholarship / Some stories confirming my leadership skills. [Chevening] Leadership and Influence Question [2]

Hi! I'm planning to apply for Chevening Scholarship. I would appreciate any feedback. Many thanks!

i have found useful solutions

In Uzbek families, since childhood, people are taught to be modest. May be, because of this reason, it was pretty hard for me to write about my skills. Since I have to, I will share with you couple of stories from my two job experiences where I had to demonstrate my leadership and influence skills.

When I was hired at my first job - "Electronic Government" system development Center - I was a level five student. I had not had job experience before so I was bit flurried. Fortunately, my worries disappeared as I quickly got involved in my work. Very soon I started to be given tasks requiring more and more responsibility. In fifth month of my work, I was appointed as a head of one of coordinating teams. We were given task to design documents of automation of communal services and single billing system. Our team consisted of young specialists and we lacked experience. Moreover, we were provided only 3 months to fulfill the assignment, which meant we would have enough time fix final result, if we something goes wrong. Taking into consideration these two factorsб I suggested the team members to use lean development method instead of waterfall, which was traditional in governmental organizations. Lean method would assist us to realize the project little by little - after completing each part, we "released" it, received remarks and comments from experienced colleagues and moved on next part. Eventually we completed the work successfully since all the mistakes were eliminated immediately after obtaining feedback.

Another story I want to share happened in my second job, where I'm still working. In the second week of working in Samarkanda Travel and Tours, I started realizing that my colleagues had to spend too much energy doing routine work, instead of focusing on more important tasks. It seemed to me that an appropriate software solution would help to optimize some business processes of company. I took initiative automatize this hand-made routine work by introducing information system, which I planned to develop myself. After completing the software, I encountered a huge obstacle-conservatism of my colleagues. They did not encourage to change the way of working they have been practicing for a long time. Initially I had managed to persuade them to use the system to complete at least half of their tasks so that they could assess efficiency of the solution. Now they are happy with the software. Furthermore, they started approaching me asking my opinion about optimizing some more business processes. Honestly I'm proud of inspiring them.

In my point of view, in both stories my leadership skills are embodied in two things - my solutions to the issues and the fact that I convinced people to follow the solutions. The solutions came out knowledge that initially seemed to be not related to these spheres. I believe Chevening scholarship will help me to open new latitude of knowledge that I want to use to contribute tourism sector of my country.