It cannot be taken for granted that tourism is a driving sector for the Italian economy.
Indeed, it accounts for a significant share of both the GDP (11%) and employment (14%) it provides.
At the European level, our country is the leading market in terms of the number of hotels (32,000), rooms (one million) and revenue generated by the tourism sector (USD 215 billion), while it is 'only' fourth in the number of international tourist arrivals (87 million).
However, this 'wonderful machine' has shown some weaknesses. In fact, the Covid 19 pandemic and the subsequent recession raised not only economic issues, but also safety, health, environmental and skills issues.
The long period of forced standstill has, however, led to the development of strategies and values to revive the sector and, above all, to reset a training plan in the field of Hospitality Education.
Starting from the critical issues outlined above, new values were identified to bridge the gaps and help break the impasse. More specifically
- prevention for safety and health
- regionality and localisation for the location-based environment and, for skills, on the
- diversification and skills training, through the introduction of specific skills: customer experience management, facility management, business simulation, emotional intelligencewithout forgetting the soft skills.
Tourism and new skills
In a country with a strong tourist vocation such as Italy, there is certainly no shortage of prestigious institutes and faculties to train professionals and managers in the sector. From north to south, tourism-oriented Bachelor's and Master's degree programmes are offered by humanities (languages, literature, cultural heritage and archaeology) and sociology faculties, as well as economics, statistics and law faculties.
However, this wide and varied educational offer still fails to fully and adequately meet the needs of businesses. Although the numbers enrolled in three-year courses have quadrupled and those on master's courses have tripled
- solo il 44%dei laureati lavora ad un anno dalla laurea
- less than 1/3 of them believe that university studies are useful for work
- the offer is only aimed at Italian students with little international experience.
Also on the corporate side the reskilling has now become an unavoidable requirement to meet the needs of a future that knocks insistently at the door. However, there is great difficulty in finding resources (1 in 3 companies struggle to find qualified staff) and the priority need is 'a greater managerial culture'.
La SIO (Italian School of Hospitality)has been able to capitalise on all the input from an industry undergoing profound, and ongoing, transformation by applying the Hotel School model to university education.
We will discuss this model in more detail in the next article.
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