From hospitality classrooms to successful careers: An appraisal of Australian hospitality higher education

Abstract

The higher education sector continues to struggle to ensure students’ learning outcomes are relevant to the requirements of workplaces (Bisoux, 2015; Mourshed, Farrell, & Barton, 2013; Playfoot & Hall, 2009). Moreover, hospitality education institutions particularly, continue to be criticised by employers for not meeting their employment needs (Finch, Peacock, Levallet, & Foster, 2016; Tsai, Goh, Huffman, & Wu, 2006). Therefore, it is important that hospitality education institutions begin to close the gap between the skills that students graduate with, compared to what the industry requires (Dopson & Tas, 2004; Min, Swanger, & Gursoy, 2016; Swanger & Gursoy, 2007). This thesis examines the curriculum and pedagogic requirements that contribute to beneficial graduate outcomes for Australian hotel management students. Specifically, the study seeks to identify the necessary competencies that make hotel management graduates more employable and achieve successful careers in the contemporary Australian hotel industry. Additionally, the study investigates how work integrated learning (WIL) experiences can assist graduates in obtaining the desired hotel industry competencies and further examines how WIL experiences can be best organised and enacted to enhance overall hotel management graduate outcomes. Purposefully a range of hotel managers are used as research participants, this endeavour provides for a phenomenological, employers’ and graduates’ perspective. The study adopts a mixed methods approach to data collection, which enables triangulation of various data. Conceptually, the study’s outcomes appraise, advance and potentially reposition the hotel management curriculum as embracing Australian international hotels, and enactment of students’ experiences more comprehensively. The study’s outcomes determine key currently required hospitality management competencies, and highlight these as being mostly soft skills. Furthermore, the findings identify the importance of experiential learning, and WIL in developing these essential soft skills, and thus, contributing to beneficial graduate outcomes for hotel management students. Additionally, the study potentially shapes how work integrated learning should progress in hotel management education, to the benefit of all stakeholders.