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ACE Employment InfoThank you for your interest in employment with the ACE Adventure Resort team. We are the largest and the fastest growing whitewater rafting outfitter in West Virginia, and we offer the coolest jobs too.Our season runs from April through the end of the Gauley River season in mid-October, However the real busy time is between Memorial Day and mid-October. This is seasonal outdoor work that requires a high level of "people skill" plus the technical and leadership skills necessary to lead a crew of novice paddlers down some of the East's most challenging whitewater rivers. If you provide the people skills, we can teach you the leadership and technical skills you need to be a guide, instructor or any other role. If you would like a summer job that's interesting, challenging, rewarding and (above all) fun, fill in our online application. We will get in touch with you by phone or e-mail and get you all the information you will need to decide if the ACE Adventure Resort team is right for you.
ACE's PhilosophyACE's History and Company PhilosophyACE Whitewater began running commercial river trips way back in 1980. For several years, ACE was among the smallest outfitters in West Virginia and, as late as 1986, took only 2,900 paying guests down the New and Gauley rivers. In 1987, the present ownership took over and began to grow the company aggressively. This paid off and within 8 years, ACE had grown to be the largest outfitter in the state. This growth has continued since then, culminating in being feature on the Travel Channel as North America's Largest Adventure Resort in 2009! With the addition of our off river adventures, like Zip-Ling Canopy Tours, ATV Tours, Mt. Bike Trips, Climbing Trips, etc., we added an additional user days. There are several obvious reasons for this unparalleled growth and success. First of all, we give our customers the best whitewater experience available in West Virginia. From our pioneering efforts with self-bailing rafts, smaller 12 and 14-foot boats, and private riverside lunch spots (with sanitary facilities and hot grilled lunches) to our relentless and continuing improvement of our offerings, we give our customers a whole lot more for their money than they can get anywhere else. Secondly, our 1,500-acre ACE Adventure Resort facility gives our customers a "home base" with great lodging and free activities. Everyone, employees and customers alike, appreciates the miles of hiking and biking trails, the swimming beach and the stocked fishing lakes. Our Lakeside Dining Hall serves three meals a day during the season and there’s a lively nightlife scene at the Lost Paddle Lounge. There’s simply nothing like the ACE Adventure Resort anywhere else in West Virginia and our customers keep voicing their approval by coming back in record numbers every year. Finally, our staff is head and shoulders above the competition. We’re friendly and we’re highly skilled. We love what we do and it shows…and our customers love being a part of the magic. Our philosophy is simple: give our customers the highest-quality outdoor recreation available anywhere…and have a great time doing it! Our employees are having the time of their lives and our customers enjoy being a part of the fun. With something like 200 different trips and activities, we can provide a quality outdoor adventure for just about anybody…from easy family fun trips to world-class whitewater thrills. We charge a fair price and provide top-shelf quality in all of our offerings. We treat our employees as family…and we treat our customers as guests. That’s why we have very low staff turnover and very high repeat business…and that’s why ACE is in a class by itself in the whitewater community. Personal GrowthWhat You’ll Leave Here WithWe understand that our guides are on the front lines of the effort to provide the best outdoor recreation experience anywhere. In order to attract the highest quality employees, we have to provide you with something more than just a summer job. Virtually all our top-level managers started as guides, so there’s a career opportunity here if you want it. But even if you only stay for a few seasons, you’ll leave with a lot of invaluable skills…not to mention a lot of irreplaceable memories. Very few entry-level jobs allow you to develop leadership skills. Not too many people are rushing to follow the lead of the average burger flipper. As an ACE guide, you’ll have control of a boat and a crew. It will be your knowledge and skill that allows these folks a safe and enjoyable passage down the river. It will be your decisiveness that demonstrates that skill and gives your crew the confidence to follow your lead. It will be your personality that enchants them with stories of the river and its history. It will be you that leads them. Many of your crews will be professional types. Doctors, lawyers, highly-paid professionals…they’ll put their trust in you and allow you to lead them in an exciting adventure. Think how few people ever find themselves in such a position. There’s no doubt that every ACE guide quickly develops the kind of leadership skills that most people will never achieve in their entire lives! Whether you make your career in outdoor recreation or go on to other pursuits, those leadership skills will prove invaluable throughout your life. You’ll be amazed when you discover that most of your customers simply can’t believe that you actually live and work in what has to be one of the most beautiful natural locations on earth. It’s a regrettable fact of modern life that most people live in cities and never get to spend much time in the remote outdoors. Just spending a single summer in "God’s Country" will give you an appreciation for the finer…and simpler…things of life that will last forever. Sharing this gift with a boat full of new friends is priceless. Finally, at ACE we can provide you with something that you don’t often find…while learning these skills, you get paid. With 40,000 guests to care for, we need lots of help. ACE guides, even the new ones, get a lot more work than do guides for many other companies. During the height of the season, it’s not unusual for our guides to work six or seven days a week if they want to. We provide a place for you to live at no charge and there’s so much to learn while you’re here. Any of our activities, kayaking, mountain biking, climbing, riding, caving and rafting…they’re all available to you at no charge when space is available. With so much to do, you’ll find it’s easy to save money while you’re here. Full Time StatusFull-Time or Part-TimeOur employees are either full-time employees or part-time employees. Since any outdoor recreation business is busiest on weekends, we need lots of guides who only want to work on Saturday and Sunday. Many have "real jobs" in the "real world" and are thrilled to pick up a nice additional paycheck guiding on weekends. We’re always on the lookout for quality individuals who only want to work on weekends. We’ll train you the same way we train our full-time guides except that we’ll only train on weekends. When you send us an application, we’ll send you a syllabus for our 8-week weekend training program that begins in mid-March. To be considered a full-time employee, you’ve got to be available for work at any time throughout the rafting season. We post the schedule a week in advance so you’ll know your days off at that time. Because we need to count on our full-time employees being available, we can’t allow them to take extended time off during the season. During the early part of the season, it’s not uncommon for us to have more off-river work that guiding work. Full-time employees have to agree to work in one or more off-river assignments to compliment their guiding days in order to fill a full work week. Examples of areas of off-river work that our full-time guides do are: reservations office, trail building, grounds maintenance, equipment repair, food service, bartending, and off-river guiding such as climbing/rappelling, mountain bikes, horses and caving. Especially during July and August, the vast majority of your days will be spent guiding on the river. But in the early part of the season, you’ll need some off-river days to fill out that paycheck. Full-time guides can, of course, choose the type of off-river work they’ll do. There’s hearty outdoor stuff like trail building and grounds maintenance and there’s office work like telephone reservations and food service. Full-time guides will choose an area they’d like to work in and then they’ll interview with the appropriate manager to secure the job. Here’s the most important thing to remember about off-river work. Since full-time guides are making a commitment to ACE, they get priority for river days. So volunteering for off-river work actually gets you more days on the river! Any guide who doesn’t want to perform some type of off-river work is considered a part-time guide. We never require that you work off-river but we do give scheduling priority to those who have made the commitment to be full-time employees. BenefitsBenefits Include:Unlimited river trips for staff based on availability.
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