Themes

Many of the factors affecting the sector go beyond specific industry and geographic areas. These include particular skill areas or issues such as the ageing workforce or women in management. On a regular basis we produce papers combining data and analysis to highlight these specific themes. We are keen to hear what bothers you and your thoughts on some of the issues highlighted in our research.

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• 02 August 2006

  Knitting with fog

  “You’ll soon see mate that it’s like knitting with fog. Good luck!”. With that he hit me on the back and left the room still chuckling to himself. This was back in January. I had just presented to a group of college lecturers and announced that we were about to embark on a study to assess how well the learning supply was meeting the needs of the sector. The particularly unhelpful observation had come from one of those lecturers. I had known him for a number of years and he had made his views very clear in the meeting that he thought we had a particularly difficult challenge ahead of us. Six months on, we have finished that assessment and well, he might have had a point.

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• 02 August 2006

  Counting Those Pennies

  The government spends an estimated 250 million a year on training provision for the hospitality, leisure, travel and tourism sector in England. However, most employers do not know how to access this provision and those who do access it often find the process confusing and inconsistent.

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• 02 August 2006

  Is Poland Facing a Brain Drain?

  Over the last year, 72,000 workers from the EU Accession States have entered the hospitality, leisure, travel and tourism sector. Over 60 percent of these are Polish. Employers rate them highly for their hard work and their customer service. At the same time employers are lamenting the skills of younger British workers. What is Poland doing that is different and what is the wider impact on this sudden migration?

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• 02 August 2006

  What do the they really think?

  Many employers and lecturers believe that students are not attracted to our sector because it suffers from an image of poor pay, long and unsociable hours and a lack of real career opportunities. This may have been the view in the 1980’s but is it really how our students perceive the career prospects in the sector today?

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• 02 August 2006

  It never used to be like this

  Nobody can argue that the purpose of provision in hospitality and catering and travel and tourism is to equip individuals with the skills to gain and undertake roles in the sector and ultimately to continue to progress and stay within the sector. There is disagreement among different stakeholders about the degree to which this is happening. At one extreme employers comment on the lack of responsiveness by providers as well as their tendency to work in a world dominated by inflexible delivery and out of date teaching practices in non-realistic environments. Providers state that employers expect too much of new recruits who enter the workplace straight from college and continue to use work experience students as ‘cheap labour’ further exacerbating retention problems in industry.

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