Faculty Friday: Meet Claire Jollain

Faculty Friday: Meet Claire Jollain

Meet Claire Jollain, the Assistant Dean at Hotel Institute Montreux. She has extensive experience in marketing, management, and entrepreneurship, and has proved her leadership skills across different industries, from the automotive sector to the luxury industry. In this interview, she talks about her experience teaching from home and shares some advice for students.

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By Swiss Education Group

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Claire Jollain

Growing up, Claire dreamed of being a helicopter pilot (because she was a fan of the TV show Airwolf) and of being able to live in a hotel her whole life. 

Life turned out a bit differently and her path led her to communications and event planning. She even consulted on a movie about wedding planning once. In 2014, she began “piloting” students in hospitality management at César Ritz Colleges Switzerland where she taught Events Management and served as Program Manager. Claire joined Hotel Montreux Institute in 2018 and now teaches digital and luxury marketing, and management principles.

Claire HIM
Claire Jollain with her students (Cathy Yang from China, Gabriele Panni from Italy, and Klara Bergerud from Sweden)

Online learning: a stimulating challenge

In recent months, we have gone from emergency remote learning to interactive and effective online learning. I’ve found online teaching a stimulating challenge. I have had to completely rethink the way of delivering the course and not try to reproduce what happens in a classroom. It was a test and learn approach - we shared a lot within our teaching community and the students’ feedback helped us improve the process.

As surprising as it may seem, online teaching enables to personalize the learning experience with a variety of interactions with students

Advice for students 

My advice to students is to FAIL! I know this may sound provocative or inappropriate. But in fact, if you fail, it means you have tried something new, you went out of your comfort zone, and consequently, you have learned something. School is a perfect place to fail, and here at Hotel Institute Montreux, we encourage students to not be perfect but to try. The most important thing is for students to feel they are allowed to be wrong, to make mistakes, and not feel judged when they receive feedback from faculty and peers.

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By Swiss Education Group