Do you have a love for storytelling? Are you the one that people call on to show them around town? If you have a knack for this sort of thing, you may thrive as a tour guide. As a tour guide, you will get the rare opportunity of having a constantly moving office and you will get to entertain people each day. Not only that, but you will get to learn new things and explore cities, histories and ideas. You could say that the tour guide is the modern day explorer. Plus, becoming a tour guide is easy – provided that you have what it takes to become a tour guide. Here are five steps to becoming a tour guide.

1. First you have to decide what your interests are. If you aren’t interested in a certain subject, it will become a boring and tedious job. For instance, if you have an interest and passion in Hollywood history, there are many tour guide positions that will allow you to give tourists an unbridled tour of Hollywood – its good days, its bad days and much more. So, find what you are passionate about and start from there.
2. Get your certificate. While you don’t have to get your certificate, it can give you a huge advantage when it comes to looking for and securing a job. With a certificate, you will get more responses and it will increase your chances of getting hired. To get your certificate, you must enroll in one of a tour guide program, which will give you the tools to be more animated and to have better public speaking skills. When you are a tour guide, it is important to have excellent public speaking skills, because you want to be able to capture your audience’s interest.
3. Do your research. When you actually become a tour guide, you want to be sure to do your fair share of research about the subject. When it comes down to it, there may be many sources for a particular subject, so you want to be able to weed out the good from the bad. For instance, if you are a tour guide for Travels With Soha, you will need to know a lot about the world’s tennis vacation destinations and tennis tour locations.
4. Start applying for positions. Once you have your niche down and you have your certificate, you want to start looking for available positions. You can visit the website of various tour guide companies or you can look through classifieds online. Once you secure a few interviews, you want to be prepared with a pitch. The key is to convince the person that there is no one else that is right for the job, which is where all your research will come in handy.
5. Keep learning. There will undoubtedly be more and more to learn when you are a tour guide. So, you want to make sure that your education is ongoing. At the end of the day, there should always be a stack of books for you to be reading and taking notes. If you want to be the best tour guide, you need to have an expansive knowledge of a broad array of topics.