Carrie Boldman named vice president and general manager at Cedar Point
Cedar Point today announced that Carrie Boldman has been named vice president and general manager of the park. She succeeds Jason McClure, who has been promoted to senior vice president, park operations, at Cedar Point’s parent company, Cedar Fair Entertainment Company.
Very happy for her, have had 3 pleasant interactions with her in recent years. She comes off as very passionate and customer focused in my experience.
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Not sure how the skill set transfers but I have been thoroughly impressed with the upgrades to Merch that I have seen. The new line of Christmas ornaments are spectacular, as an example. These jobs require creativity and vision so I'm excited to see what Carrie brings to the GM position.
"You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world...but it requires people to make the dreams a reality."
-Walt Disney
Chief Wahoo said:
Not sure how the skill set transfers...
In my experience effective leadership skills transfer pretty well across disciplines/departments. I'd rather have a good leader who's not an subject matter expert, than a subject matter expert lacking leadership skills.
Brandon
I generally tend to agree with this. Experience is earned. That's one of the reasons why I get annoyed with people who think education allows you to skip the line. Education helps prepare you, but it's not experience.
Jeff - Advocate of Great Great Tunnels™ - Co-Publisher - PointBuzz - CoasterBuzz - Blog - Music
I like how some of these individuals have worked for Disney. Even the small details added to the parks have made a big difference in the last decade.
Jeff said:
I generally tend to agree with this. Experience is earned. That's one of the reasons why I get annoyed with people who think education allows you to skip the line. Education helps prepare you, but it's not experience.
The company I work for is Danish, and although education is important they tend to put more value on experience when it comes to promotions than education compared to American companies I have worked for. It's refreshing.
Jeff said:
Education helps prepare you, but it's not experience.
This is the reason I like being in my field of work. You'll get farther with experience before someone with a degree. I use to work with a guy who had two Masters Degrees but yet I made more money than him. While he was in school getting those degrees, I was getting the experience required to move ahead.
Chief Wahoo, it's interesting you mentioned the Christmas ornaments. I have never had the pleasure of meeting Carrie, but on our last visit last summer those ornaments really made an impression; ended up buying one as our annual family ornament (a little tradition we have), and had a hard time picking out just one.
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I hope my comments didn't come off as critical...because they were not intended to be. I don't know Carrie. I guess I was meaning...does the creativity improvement in merchandise transfer over to creative improvements park wide?
Greg Scheid came out of the Merchandise side of the house and was an effective GM and VP. Hildebrandt came out of Marketing. Kinzel came out of Foods. I think a leader is a leader regardless. I was more interested in what her skill set (specifically the bold thinking that she appears to have brought in her previous job) can bring at this level of leadership and I'm excited to see it.
"You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world...but it requires people to make the dreams a reality."
-Walt Disney
99er said:
You'll get farther with experience before someone with a degree. I use to work with a guy who had two Masters Degrees but yet I made more money than him.
Believe it or not, this is often the case in software development as well. I worked with people in Seattle who didn't go to college at all, and I didn't study CS. I've worked with some pretty terrible PhD's, too.
Jeff - Advocate of Great Great Tunnels™ - Co-Publisher - PointBuzz - CoasterBuzz - Blog - Music
Sadly some companies haven't come to terms with this mentality. I work at an engineering company, and we have some really sharp people who never got an actual engineering degree, and because of that they are limited in terms of their salary grade. It's kind of silly that a piece of paper differentiates a kid fresh out of college and someone who has worked in the industry for 15 years.
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I would agree and disagree regarding college education. While I agree in the value that should be placed (and often is not) on experience, I can appreciate someone who has both, and ultimately, can bring both sides of the coin to the table. Do I think that a college education automatically makes someone better? Absolutely not. But do I think that those who put the effort in to earn their degrees shouldn’t be given a second look? No.
Earning a degree has multiple merits beyond just doing it in hopes of getting a better job. Because yes, many “career” jobs do offer better money for a college degree, whether we agree with that system or not.
Personally I’ve earned an Associates, Bachelors and am currently in grad school for social media and strategic communication. With my additional earned experience and multiple internships in my field I will have the upper edge when it comes time for me to go after my true career job. I know my degrees alone would not get me that, so I made sure to gain as much field experience as I could. But earning those degrees means a lot more to me for personal reasons, and I’m damn proud that, even though it took a very long time, I finally finished college, the first in my family to do so. So for me, it means a little more.
That being said, I wholeheartedly agree that experience needs more focus. Absolutely.
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