Hotel school graduates’ preparedness for the first line management role in the hospitality industry in the Western Cape

Abstract

The hospitality industry is a highly service-orientated sector and therefore requires hospitality graduates to be prepared for the industry. This can be done if higher education institutions fully equip hospitality graduates for the industry during their tertiary period so that when they get to the workplace they have what the hospitality employers expect from them. The research problem is that there seem to be existing challenges/contradictions in the hospitality graduates’ preparation by the hotel school at a university in the Western Cape for the first line management (FLM) role. This study set out to explore these challenges and to bring together academic staff, employers and hospitality graduates to collectively seek potential interventions. The objective of the study was to focus on hotel school graduates' preparedness for the FLM role in the hospitality industry in the Western Cape. This was done using a qualitative intervention-research methodology, the Change Laboratory (CL), which allows participants involved in the problem to generate solutions through dialogic workshops for change. Historical data was collected through in-depth interviews (mirror data) with six hospitality lecturers and four hospitality employers (selected from five-star hotels in Cape Town) through purposive sampling. This was followed by four CL intervention sessions with six hospitality graduates, self-selected through non-probability purposive sampling. The mirror data collected from hospitality employers and academic staff were closely aligned as there seemed to be agreement that hospitality graduates were not prepared for the FLM role in the industry. In the CL sessions, the main contradictions of the hospitality graduates’ preparedness for the FLM role in the industry emerged during the analysis stage and the modelling stages. A new activity system for the future for the hospitality graduates’ preparedness for the FLM role was developed as a solution to the outlined main contradictions. This was envisaged to be an activity system that would produce a possible solution to the research problem. The study therefore recommends further research be done on the proposed new activity system so that all the processes of the expansive learning cycle could be completed for the proposals to be effected at this UoT hotel school as this would bring about the needed change (prepared hospitality graduates).