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Soft skills as main pillar of tourism graduates employability: INCOME project outputs

In the context of the Tourism and Hospitality (T&H) industries, given their specific characteristics, soft skills are increasingly common place in job descriptions, indicating that many employers recognize their importance to their businesses’ performance and competitiveness. Although soft skills are considered of major importance, it seems there is a gap between what market needs and what European Higher Education Institutions with Tourism degrees actually offer. As one of many initiatives to cope with challenge to overcome this gap, INCOME Tourism Project aims at developing a new learning approach based on a cooperative learning process joining higher education and tourism businesses. It focused on soft skills learning which was designed and incorporated in the last year of the Tourism Bachelor degree. Although some efforts are found in different higher education contexts, there is still the need and potential to bring academia and industry closer together in a new cooperative learning model to achieve a curriculum focusing on soft skills and with learning outcomes adapted to the real, evolving and demanding needs of the tourism industry. This is the ultimate purpose of INCOME Tourism project. Thus, to improve the employability of tourism graduates in the EU’s rapidly evolving T&H sector, HEI educators must continually investigate which soft skills are essential for T&H graduates to possess across the EU and amend the T&H curriculum to meet these needs (Sisson & Adams, 2013). Therefore, the purpose of this research is to determine the critical soft skills that T&H employers across the EU want from EU’s graduates and to determine whether differences exist between competencies needed by T&H managers and competencies furnished through HEIs’ T&H curricula. An exploratory both qualitative and quantitative research techniques are employed to identify the conceptual/creative, leadership, and interpersonal competencies (i.e., soft skills), as seen through the eyes of EU’s T&H professionals, educators, recent graduates, and current students. The data collection involved three stages. Firstly, an operational definition and an initial (i.e., raw) item pool of specific T&H soft skills was generated based on Sandwith’s (1993) Competency Domain Model. The extensive review of the theoretical and empirical realms of T&H literature yielded an initial pool containing 305 items of relevance to this research. Secondly, the elicited key soft skills were further reviewed and ranked by panel of experts from six EU countries (Croatia, Germany, Italy, Malta, Portugal, and Spain). Thirdly, a final set of 30 items – 10 items per each of the three soft skills dimensions (i.e. conceptual/creative, leadership, and interpersonal) was used to create the final survey instrument which was administered to former and current T&H students. In the final part, the results of perceived importance vs. satisfaction with soft skills attained among Croatian former and current students are presented and recommendations for HEIs and curricula adjustments presented.

soft skills, tourism and hospitality, INCOME tourism project

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