Evaluating Industry Expectations from Tourism Students: Mapping the (Generic, Vocational, Applied) Competencies

Abstract

The tourism education has undergone a paradigm shift in last few years. The Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India has started some of the most desired restructuring in the education system. This includes initiatives like skill development and integrating employability education into school education and under graduate education. National Skill Qualification Framework (NSQF) has established a system of clear educational path ways qualification packs (QP’s) from school to higher education by providing certification (Level 1 to Level 7 and above) to vocational skills with options of multiple level entry and multiple level exit programs. The importance of this has also been reflected in the National Education Policy (NEP)-2020. The present paper, which is a part of ICSSR sponsored major research project, is based on exploring expectations from the tourism students who have joined the industry after the completion of course in tourism (either at senior secondary level or at undergraduate level). The method of tool preparation based on the results obtained, has been discussed in the present study. The industry expectations have been collected via Google forms in the month of March-April, 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown period and responses are collected from the eminent industry experts which were analysed using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The various expectations thus obtained based on majority responses can be mapped with the curriculum of the course in focus which is being run at various educational institutes of Himachal Pradesh. The results can be highly beneficial not only for improvement in curriculum but in preparing better candidates for the tourism industry. The results are further utilized to probe both teachers and students associated with the course to ascertain the level upto which the curriculum fulfills the expectations laid by the industry experts. Two tools have thus been prepared and they were validated by experts from education, research and tourism. The tools prepared could prove to be fruitful for evaluating any curriculum associated with the course which is the focal point of the research.

Keywords: Vocational Education, Skill Development, Qualification Packs, Tourism Education, Skill Mapping etc.

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