What are the skill tourism employers look for in their employees? And how well prepared are migrants regarding these?
The first year of the Tour2Include project focused on finding answers to these and related questions. In order to do so, partners conducted a field research on the topic in Germany, Greece and Italy. In this scope, the consortium firstly focused on tourism employers’ expectations in terms of employee know-how. After analysing the most important skills and competences, requested by those, the team conducted another field research aimed at evaluating the development of the identified skills among the migrant population in the partner countries. Among the evaluated skills, there were general soft skills, such as organisational capacity and time management, resilience and autonomy, intercultural soft skills, among them adaptability as well as some tourism-related technical skills, such as costumer service or basic digital skills.
The research was conducted mostly online and contained two different instruments: an online self-evaluation to be completed by migrants themselves as well as the implementation of a couple of private sessions, in which professionals interviewed participants and evaluated their skills based on a pre-defined questionnaire containing a set of questions for each skill. The results showed that migrants’ skills were overall well developed in the respective areas: In average, all of them were on a medium or high level. However, the consortium still identified a couple of learning needs regarding topics, such as level of local language, basic digital skills or ability to solve problems.
Now the consortium is working on the definition of training modules, which will contain educational materials addressing all of those areas, in which migrants’ skills still show room for improvement. They will be tested with the beneficiaries themselves starting from next spring.
About Tour2Include
Tour2Include is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Program, Key Action 2 – Strategic Partnerships for Adult Education and is carried out by six organisations:
- SOCIAL IMPACT GGMBH (Germany, coordinator),
- BK Consult (Germany),
- AKMI Katartisi Ekpaideusi (Greece),
- SYMPLEXIS (Greece),
- IDP SAS DI GIANCARLO COSTANTINO (Italian Development Partners) (Italy),
- CESIE (Italy).
For further positive information about the project, please read the project description or contact Paula Goltzsche: paula.goltzsche@cesie.org.
