This story is no longer valid.
One of the options qualified beauty therapists, nail technicians and spa therapists have employment-wise is work aboard a cruise ship. The largest single recruiter for these positions aboard cruise ships are Steiner, a company who first put a hairdressing salon on Cunard’s Queen Mary way back in 1967 and soon thereafter aboard the Queen Elizabeth II. Over the years, they reckon they’ve recruited over 50,000 people to work on cruise ships and land-based spas around the world.
I’ve known quite a few of our students who have gone on to work for Steiner, and all of them I’ve spoken to had a good time. Hard work, they’ve told me, but overall it’s an experience they have cherished. One of my closest friends, at the time in her early 50s, went to work for Steiner aboard a smaller, high-class cruise ship spent its time split between the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, jetting over the Atlantic Ocean in the process. Being on a smaller ship, the crew were obviously smaller in number, and this made their relationships with one another more like family than anything. And that bond seems to resonate with various other people I’ve spoken to who have worked on ships.
The National School of Aesthetics has the luxury to work closely with Steiner, with holding interviews on our campus as well as distributing literature related to Steiner to people requesting it New Zealand-wide. We also gain some perks from this by visiting spas on-board various ships docked in New Zealand and overseas, and also while sailing on some voyages, to gain insight into how a shipboard spa operates, any new technologies or techniques available, and to take this information back to interested students and staff alike.
With this relationship between Steiner and the National School of Aesthetics built strongly around trust and mutual-cooperation, to my knowledge, our students tend to be picked at a higher rate than other South Island providers. At one point, 10% of one graduating intake applied for, and were accepted by, Steiner. And, we enjoy hearing feedback that our students tend to be of a higher standard and calibre than students from other institutions.
So if you are seriously considering working on a cruise ship as a career opportunity, and you want some of the best training available to prepare you for that and many other career opportunities (if you haven’t already trained with us), feel free to contact us, and we’ll help you as best as we can. Or, if you want more information on how we work with Steiner, feel free to visit the Steiner portal on our Web site.
Scott Fack is the Director of Operations for The National School of Aesthetics, the South Island’s leading beauty therapy, nail technology and spa therapies training provider.