Tourism industry wants Grads with skills beyond tourism

The first part of the Tourism Academics & Employers Conference hosted by ABTA, the ITT and The Tourism Society kicked off last week in London. The Midlands conference will take place on June 30th at the Copthorne Birmingham.

One of the main discussions revolved around travel and tourism graduates and qualifications of new graduates entering the industry. When applying for its graduate training program, Thomas Cook is demanding that travel and tourism graduates score higher than graduates coming from other disciplines. The company feels that travel and tourism programs fail to encourage skills such as leadership, analytics, and basic business skills which students coming from other backgrounds have. Many tourism companies don’t even require that new comers have tourism degrees; rather they’re looking for people who are highly motivated and driven and possess good communication skills.

Hertfordshire University senior lecturer Brandon Crimes said that the challenge in teaching lies in creating a good curriculum. With so many travel and tourism courses popping up, it has been recognized that more action needs to be taken to get tourism academics and industry professionals to network and create a discussion to ensure that what’s being taught during school is relevant to the workplace. The need to make sure tourism students are being employed by the tourism industry and that teachers are receiving the help they require to create updated and relevant material were all recognized as areas which need to be addressed.

The upcoming conference will include topics such as curriculum content, teaching resources, graduate opportunities and apprenticeships.

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