A regular feature, inviting key individuals to comment on an aspect of scenario planning. Andrew Martin, Director of Scottish Centre of Tourism at Robert Gordon University looks at quality and skills within the tourism industry.

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Competing and winning on quality – the need for an appropriately skilled Tourism industry

Raising quality standards

The UK in general and Scotland in particular will never be a cheap destination - the cost of transportation, petrol, exchange rates and our labour rates ensure that. The basis for competition is therefore set - Scotland cannot win on price; so the product has to be good - no excellent, providing a high quality experience that is still value for money. Success with this strategy is dependant on people: the best of informed management supporting trained and switched on front line staff.

Skills and Career Development – the key to Quality

In common with all industries competing on a world stage, there is a requirement for the very best of management to take the lead.

Management Skills
There is a major shortfall in the number of skilled management. Only some 34,000 of the tourism workforce (circa 17%) have qualifications of SVQ level 4 and above.  This compares unfavourably with other UK industry sectors (People 1st, 2004).  Solutions to this lie in a number of different hands but will require strategies to attract greater numbers of well educated, ambitious new employees.  A recent research approach to the skills gaps issue has involved focusing on practical learning and development opportunities for owner/managers within the industry as opposed to employees (RGU, 2004).  

The conclusions of this work can be summarised as follows:

• A clear importance attributed to skills in the areas of human resources incorporating ability in delegating, ability to manage the managers, leadership skills, and proficiency in training and “soft” skills of time management, interpersonal behaviours, and effective verbal communication.
• The presence of marketing and technological skills of proficiency in e-marketing, and ability in identifying target markets reaffirm the importance of these skills and the fact that they remain as gap areas.

In terms of skills gaps, research has shown a willingness on behalf of managers’ to overcome these skills gaps but the resources providing these opportunities must be easily accessible, user-friendly, bespoke and structured.  Actions might include: -

• Creating a greater awareness of career ladders within tourism with the focus on employers to make career progression more understandable and transparent with support and dissemination from all stakeholders;

Greater promotion of tourism and hospitality as a career by all stakeholders in conjunction with lead agencies such as Springboard Scotland and People 1^st. This should also link in with work on reputation, branding and HR in conjunction with other key development areas of Scottish Enterprise, e.g., e-commerce.

Career Development Mechanisms
To address the twin problems of the existing low levels of management qualification and knowledge updating in a dynamic industry, there is a need to substantively increase the effectiveness and aspirations of managers already in employment.

Actions might include: -

• Improving availability of Career Professional Development (CPD) for private and public sector employees Public agencies might work formally with employers, higher education (HE) and private training providers to ensure greater variety of cost effective, credit-rated developmental learning opportunities by 2007;
• Delivery of programmes in a cost effective manner within the precepts of the life-long learning agenda.  The fragmented nature of the geographical structure and the dominance in number terms of micro and family businesses has not helped past schemes to be successful.  Lead public sector agencies across higher education, tourism development and marketing need to harmonise approaches and develop sources funding available to industry to fund these programmes;
• Programmes should allow maximum student/employee choice and provide incentives for managers to undertake development and training.  Several measures, including mechanisms for academic credit transferability and financial support for gaining qualifications, should be fully explored by HE providers to action, in conjunction with public sector, new forms of funding.
• Certainly the way forward has been indicated by the innovative e-learning site produced by the Scottish Centre of Tourism in the Robert Gordon University and part funded by the European Social Fund (ESF).

This resource was produced to provide industry with bite size on-line CPD at a time and place convenient to the learner.

Career development: priorities for content
To overcome current weaknesses in provision (see Watson, McCracken and Hughes, 2004; Mactaggart, Martin and Davies 2004) content must be relevant to the future competitiveness to meet Scottish Executive aspirations for tourism and thus embrace areas of leadership, organisational change, networking, HRM, creativity and new technology/e-commerce.  

To overcome past failing it is suggested that CPD content should be work based and interactive as much as possible, easily accessible and low cost to the employer/employee Lead agencies, HE providers and employers need to develop an appropriate agenda, e.g., ‘Tourism Management Excellence’ in 2007.

Andrew Martin is Director of the Scottish Centre of Tourism