Hospitality school graduates will lead your businesses to great success in the decades to come, but only if hotel schools and hoteliers work more closely together to offer valuable internships and graduate training programmes, says James Clarey
In April, Hospitality Graduate Recruitment (HGR), a Swiss organisation which helps employers find hotel school students and alumni, released a survey of 100 career teams at hotel schools, 500 hotel GMs, 500 HR managers, 1000 current hotel school students and 1000 recent graduates.
As one of the largest surveys of its type, it uncovered some interesting findings. The results revealed that 90% of hotel career teams would consider employing a hotel school graduate in the next year, but also that there is a deep divide between what the schools and what the hotels believe students are ready for upon graduating.
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Of the hotel schools questionned, 47% said graduates are ready for management trainee positions and 18% claimed they would be ready for entry level, while, of the hotel career team respondents, only 30% agreed that they were ready to enter as management trainee, with 28% saying entry level.
With almost 500 hotels in the pipeline for the Middle East andAfrica region according to June stats from STR Global, tens of thousands of jobs are being created and hotels will have to work harder than ever to source and secure the best talent for their business.
The numbers speak for themselves: Hilton Worldwide is looking to double its 16,500-strong MEA workforce by 2016, while Marriott International is expecting to increase its headcount in the same region by 100%, from 11,800 to more than 24,000 by the end of 2017.
As a result, hotels will increasingly need to look to recent graduates to find their future leaders.
However, the findings of the HGR survey suggest that there is still a long way to go when it comes to partnerships between hospitality schools and hotels, with more integration needed to bring the standards up across the board for the benefit of both parties. The hotel experts we spoke with agreed and suggested that several factors played a part in this.
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