Employability Skills for the Hotel Sector in TRNC Comparative Study of Management Expectations and Student Perceptions

ABSTRACT: While shaping the vocational tourism and hospitality, education must consider the expectations of the industry and students‘ perceptions. Students must be guided to the profession or programs after they are equipped with skills which are approved by the hotel managers. Therefore, the curricula must be designed to cover the expectations of the industry and of students. Also, the given curricula should provide the students with the skills, approved by the managers in accordance to the demands of the industry. The purpose of this thesis is to reveal the skills which are necessary in the profession of tourism and hospitality in North Cyprus. The thesis aims at comparing the hospitality managers‘ expectations of the graduate skills with the students‘ perception of the skills. The important point is that the trained and the recruited students should compete in the workplace and make use of knowledge and technology effectively. Therefore, we need professionally trained students and a good education infrastructure. It is necessary that teachers must be well-educated pedagogically. Vocational education is very expensive. It is more important to have a good relationship with the stakeholders of the industry for sustainable infrastructure of education. The samples of this study include the hotel managers who work in the tourism industry with three, four and five star hotels in TRNC; the hotel and department managers and the students who are studying at vocational tourism high schools, and the university students who study in tourism departments in the second and the fourth year programs. In this study, the findings show us that the expectations of the students and the industry tend to be similar and interrelated. The results in the first state the fact that the perceptions of students and the expectations of the managers are highly consistent among half of the ranked scores; in each group , the same top two ―interpersonal skills and teamwork and leadership skills‖ and the last two ―conceptual and analytical and information management‖ generic skill domains are identical. In this thesis, the discussion of the results, the managerial implications are presented besides limitations of the study, and implication for future research. Key words: Tourism and Hospitality Education, Skills, Managers Expectations and Students Perceptions, Hotel Industry and Education Industry. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………