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Hospitality education offers promising tourism careers
The two-day World Wide Education fair was held at Hotel Mulia on March 6 and 7, offering visitors an insight into the opportunities in the hospitality industry
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T
he two-day World Wide Education fair was held at Hotel Mulia on March 6 and 7, offering visitors an insight into the opportunities in the hospitality industry.
Tjien, 50, was among many parents who attended the fair held by Vista Education Services, a consulting company, with questions about what the hospitality sector had to offer.
“Why should it take someone several years to study how to wash dishes and serve beverages?” Tjien asked.
The vice president of Laureate Hospitality Education, Sanford Link, had the answer. “Ten percent of jobs worldwide are related to the hospitality industry, so it offers good career opportunity,” he explained.
In Indonesia, some 2.5 million people work in tourism, which attracted 6.4 million foreign tourists and contributed up to US$6.5 billion to Indonesia’s foreign exchange reserves in 2009, an 8 percent increase on 2008.
With the Indonesian government aiming to attract 7 million international visitors in 2010, the fair’s organizers pointed out that there are plenty of management level opportunities for hospitality education graduates in hotels, catering, tourism, hospitality consulting and education, airlines and cruises, clubs, spas, fitness and health businesses.
Link added that in the hospitality sector, managers and supervisors must understand and experience the work that their staff did in order for the business to function optimally.
According to Link, education is the key to good hospitality. Laureate Hospitality Education owns eight universities in five different countries; Switzerland, China, Spain, the United States and Australia.
Link believed that if there were more professionals in Indonesia that graduated from hospitality management programs that “have high levels of accreditation; tourism in Indonesia will feel the advantages.”
In an effort to achieve just that, Indonesia’s Department of Education has integrated hospitality and tourism training into high schools.
In addition to this, the Indonesian Tourism Higher Education Institution Association, which groups 71 academies and other educational institutions of various levels, teaches different tourist industry sectors, such as travel, guide services, restaurants, and hotels.
However, there remains a need for more extensive education at the management level, Link said.
Link, who represented the Laureate group at the fair, told The Jakarta Post that up to 300 Indonesian students had taken Hospitality Education at Laureate’s universities in the past 10 to 12 years. “For the last 10 years, 90 percent of our students have been accepted into jobs right after they graduate,” he said.
The education expo at Hotel Mulia was part of Vista Education Services’ four city tour to Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung and Denpasar, which is meant to provide prospective students with insights about studying overseas.
According to Vista, the tuition fees for universities overseas were often cheaper than those at Indonesia’s institutions because education overseas is generally subsidized by taxation.
At least 20 institutions, representing universities from, among others, the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Singapore, promoted their various programs at the fair.
