Tourism Education Employability
Literature review
The issue of higher education and its relation to working life of graduates has been intensely discussed since the beginning of the 1990´s. Generally there have been constant complains about an alleged mismatch between graduate competence and competence required by potential employers.Tourism employers often recruit non-tourism graduates (for example, graduates in business studies) who are able to demonstrate the generic skills required for a vocation in tourism (Dale & Robinson, 2001). Once recruited, the employer might have to train the graduate in specialist skills that have not been directly taught on their programme of study. Cooper and Westlake (1998) recognise that curriculum planning of tourism courses ‘involves the need to demonstrate efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness to stakeholders’. Thus, in recent years, there has been a drive towards a more coherent approach to the content of tourism education, focusing on the need for the student to learn how to learn and be flexible (Christou, 1999).
The tourism industry has grown world-wide which has created new jobs within the sector. But as Bibbings (2001) has done in UK, the following questions can be put: what jobs are these, and are the courses offered in higher education actually supplying the industry with graduates who have the attributes that employers need, in order to achieve the quality required to compete?...The majority of businesses are SMEs with a much smaller number of big players. So when these businesses are looking for employees, what are they looking for? Do they want graduates? Do they want tourism generalists, or graduates with a functional speciality e.g. marketing? Do they know what a tourism graduate can do? Is it possible to profile a tourism graduate’? Do graduates need the same skills for every type of job in the tourism industry? What is it that students value about their courses? ‘Tourism’covers a broad span of sectors within its overall
The issue of higher education and its relation to working life of graduates has been intensely discussed since the beginning of the 1990´s. Generally there have been constant complains about an alleged mismatch between graduate competence and competence required by potential employers.Tourism employers often recruit non-tourism graduates (for example, graduates in business studies) who are able to demonstrate the generic skills required for a vocation in tourism (Dale & Robinson, 2001). Once recruited, the employer might have to train the graduate in specialist skills that have not been directly taught on their programme of study. Cooper and Westlake (1998) recognise that curriculum planning of tourism courses ‘involves the need to demonstrate efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness to stakeholders’. Thus, in recent years, there has been a drive towards a more coherent approach to the content of tourism education, focusing on the need for the student to learn how to learn and be flexible (Christou, 1999).
The tourism industry has grown world-wide which has created new jobs within the sector. But as Bibbings (2001) has done in UK, the following questions can be put: what jobs are these, and are the courses offered in higher education actually supplying the industry with graduates who have the attributes that employers need, in order to achieve the quality required to compete?...The majority of businesses are SMEs with a much smaller number of big players. So when these businesses are looking for employees, what are they looking for? Do they want graduates? Do they want tourism generalists, or graduates with a functional speciality e.g. marketing? Do they know what a tourism graduate can do? Is it possible to profile a tourism graduate’? Do graduates need the same skills for every type of job in the tourism industry? What is it that students value about their courses? ‘Tourism’covers a broad span of sectors within its overall