Believing in continually building its team while offering quality service with ‘heart and soul’, Gondwana Collection Namibia provides ongoing training to all employees in its in-house training academy. This year, it kicked off with an early start, focusing on management training, with the 12-month Go4Gold Leadership programme.

Programme leader, Ume Goldbeck, said: “We have never started off a year with a more relevant and contemporary programme than this one.” In 2021, she developed the content for the course “to develop the Gondwana leaders of tomorrow” in collaboration with organisational development consultants from Austria. 

The Go4Gold programme comprises six modules, five with ‘on-the-job’ projects, enabling participants to implement the knowledge gained in the course at the workplace, and a one-year project to foster strategic thinking, decision-making, planning and budgeting. The modules provide a good balance between technical and soft skills essential for a leadership position with Gondwana. The topics range from gaining a deeper understanding of yourself and your behaviour to understanding team dynamics and gleaning knowledge of economics and the tourism industry. Twelve participants were selected for the programme from Gondwana’s lodge-based and Windhoek employees. 

This year, Gondwana is also offering a leadership course for 30 of its supervisors and heads of department, developing skills and optimising talents.

Goldbeck said: “We are growing the Gondwana people’s talents to enable them to be mindful, self-confident and effective leaders, who have high self and social awareness skills and fundamental management know-how. This will enable them to understand the tourism industry to benefit both the Gondwana Collection Namibia, as well as the country as a whole.”