Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Management
The Increasing Need For Skilled, Educated Employees
Hospitality 2000: A View to the Next Millennium is the first global research study to pinpoint significant trends and strategic issues that will impact the hospitality industry in future. These trends and changes are occurring on the customer, market, product, and organization levels. Among these trends are new industry standards for management, ones that require a higher level of education and training than are traditional in the hospitality industry. Customer information systems, the extension of services, the virtual marketplace, and new performance measures all require skilled managers and employees with higher levels of education and training than ever before:
As the hospitality industry changes, recruitment of skilled managers will be critical. Eight out of ten industry executives agree that this will be an important human resource challenge. Leaders are also concerned with the availability of skilled employees and the adequacy of hospitality education.
The challenge to human resources comes from the fact that traditionally the restaurant and hospitality industries have relied on low-wage labor for profitability. Because of this, employees are often low-skilled, uneducated workers, college students and young teens employed for the first time. Many managers in the restaurant and hospitality industries are not college graduates but former bus-boys or bus-girls who worked their way up in the business to management positions. However, the changes in the restaurant and hospitality industry are such that the recruitment of skilled, educated managers and employees is thought to be critical for future success.
At the recent Council on Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Education conference, educators and corporate executives felt that one of the biggest obstacles for organizations trying to attract skilled, educa...