This may be read along with Car Rental Business: Opportunities being created..
Good career opportunities get created as and when a business starts scaling up. Normally a cab company is all about Drivers, Dispatch Executives, Maintenance guys, and may be accounting guys. However, the moment we talk of seriousness and scale in the sector – the concerns related to capacity utilization, service, and support and value additions for the customer steps in. The USP for all players need to thrive on quality of service, reliability, safety and of course transparency in pricing. For all these to actually happen – companies have already invested in technology, quality & processes. Now you also need great talent to build, maintain, run and optimize the processes as well as technology.
Typical opportunities that may emerge:
Car Rental Companies:
At the front line and operational level the following opportunities exist and would continue to grow. Drivers, Supervisors, Maintenance Teams, Engineering etc. Almost all these rental services companies maintain their own call centers – therefore in bound customer service, shift in charge, manager – operations kind of position would keep on coming up. Moving up in the hierarchy for Management jobs – almost all functional skills would be required by these companies. The key focus would be on quality & processes, human resource & training, purchase management, and of course finance. Considering that every company would be penetrating multiple geographies, over a period of time the businesses may consider the need for business heads to head various geographies. Marketing, Corporate Sales teams would also be needed. Marketing setup to ensure visibility of the brand across platforms, and sales set up for corporate level deals & tie ups. On alternate revenue streams a sales team that helps monetize the advertisement potential of the cabs is also going to be created for most companies. (In fact these are already in place for most of the players.)
In a way we can see a proper corporate structure emerging with a well-established functional set up needed to ensure that the business is able to grow well, and offer good quality services to the end customers. For cab rental companies – IT setup may be outsourced as the key strength for the business needs to be on service, and IT would just be an enabler.
Cab Service Aggregators:
Aggregators are not exactly car rental companies in the travel space, but IT platforms and e-commerce setups. The talent needs would thereby be slightly different. For aggregators – three type of manpower becomes very important – 1. Those who help create, build and nurture the supply side of the system. 2. The IT / Technology team that needs to innovate and craft a platform that stays available is scalable and is highly user-friendly. 3. The service team / quality team to ensure that customers don’t face any issues and in case of any issue the same is resolved at the earliest. A challenge for the teams would be to ensure consistency of service with regards to feel, perception and conduct of drivers. This becomes important since the supply side is not owned by the company.
For mature businesses in the space – the standard requirement of various functional skill becomes important. On field level, training of partner companies, helping leverage branding opportunities and opportunities to create new value offering, customer service setup would emerge as spaces having max opportunities. As with any other internet / online business there would be ample requirement of techies, developers and innovators at all levels. As a business scales up standard requirement of functional teams etc. would come up for almost all the companies.
In all we see ample opportunities emerging, and well opportunities for professionals at all levels.