Page 111 - Microsoft Word - Guiding light final version 0839 1106.doc

‘My time as Training Manager also saw the running of the free, compulsory ‘Sharing Best Practice’ workshops which received a mixed welcome from the STGA Membership. So what do trainers look for in someone wanting to be a guide? For Viola it is passion and attitude for wanting to be a guide and realistic expectations in that tourist guides are service providers. If this isn’t given, the training won’t fall on fertile soil. It is about finding the right people. Tourist Guiding isn’t for everyone. You can’t train passion and enthusiasm - you can train skills and open the door to knowledge and hope to inspire the journey to professionalism and fulfilment.
Mary Kemp Clarke cites ‘a love for our subject (Scotland) and a love for people (our guests). ‘No course teaches the knowledge from A to Z,’ she says. ‘This is what many sometimes think a course involves. It does not. Knowledge is acquired throughout our courses, throughout our careers as guides and throughout our lives. It chops and changes and is re- visited. What we aim for in a course is the seamless use of guiding skills which communicate and entertain and engage our visitors with ease. It is vocational training at its best.’
There are many varied characters in the guiding world. Viola found that training Scottish Blue Badge Guides was challenging because of strong, argumentative characters and perhaps age profile and pragmatist approaches to learning. ‘I’m always amazed by the variety of talent and different life experience people bring to guiding. Here in Scotland only now, slowly, guiding is becoming a first career choice, so the characteristics are changing. Perhaps our guides are becoming more business-oriented, are taking more initiative are becoming better influencers? The best guides I have seen were those who took the time to listen and then created their commentary and tour according to what they had learnt from their guests.’
The ‘magnificent seven’ guides who qualified in 1999
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