Abstract
M.A.
The tourism sector in Gauteng South Africa, is evolving at a very fast pace. The industry contributes to the South African Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and to employment. Because of these factors, the preparedness of graduates requires attention.
Graduates completing tourism management-related qualifications in higher education institutions have expectations of finding employment after graduation. In addition, employers expect graduates to have gained the necessary skills, employability attributes and knowledge during their studies. However, if the skills and learning areas in the academic programmes not match the needs of the industry, this leaves graduates and employers in a precarious situation. Therefore, there is a need to evaluate the situation of the available tourism management-related academic programmes with a view to how they prepare graduates for employability.
Hence, this research explored the requirements of the tour-operating sector from an employers’ perspective in the Gauteng province of South Africa. Recently employed graduates and managers working in the inbound and outbound tour operating sectors were included in the survey from a positivist approach. The primary aim was to evaluate what the tour-operating sector requires from its employees and review this against what higher education institutions are providing. The questionnaires were self- administered with 74 and 181 valid responses received from managers and graduates respectively. Respondents’ opinions were asked for both the current and the ideal situation regarding what attributes the tour operations sector requires for employability. Exploratory factor analyses (EFA) were carried out to group the attributes under higher latent factors and a relative importance index (RII) was constructed to rank the learning areas and skills to assess if there is similarity or divergence between how graduates and managers view the employability attributes.
The EFA revealed that there are two factors contributing significantly to learning areas ‘general management’ and ‘tourism services’ and two factors contributing significantly for the skills area ‘management skills’ and ‘soft skills’ needed by graduates. Using the results of the RII, it was observed that ideally, the most important learning areas from the graduates’ perspective are detailed understanding of ‘destinations and attractions’, ‘customer care and services’, and ‘development of tourism packages/product development’. This is similar to how the managers responded. However, in the current situation, there is a large divergence between the managers and graduates...