Why work placements are essential

In recent months there has been concern about the content of hospitality degrees and the growing shift away from experiential to theoretical learning.  In the UK, out of a total of 192 Higher Education courses with ‘hospitality’ or ‘hotel’ in the title, only seven require students to complete compulsory work placements.
This disappointing statistic can be partly explained by cuts to funding associated with offering sandwich courses made when tuition fees increased, but it still doesn’t adequately explain why some institutions succeed in making work placements compulsory while the large majority don’t.

Professor Peter Jones MBE FIH, a director of the Edge Hotel School and Hotel Future, underlines the importance of practical training for our sector: “Does someone embark on a professional acting career without ever having acted? Do journalism graduates go out without ever having practised journalism? I don’t think so. And yet we think we can push out hospitality professionals without them going through the process of understanding and learning how to be a hospitality professional. We give them a whole set of academic underpinning and then we let them loose and expect them to be able to do it themselves.”

The University of Gloucestershire is one of the seven institutions that does make a year in industry compulsory. John Lannon, senior tutor at the school of leisure says: “When the students come back from the placements, I cannot begin to explain the difference! They are so much more motivated. They work long days and treat their final years like a job. They are mature adults. We can try and simulate work experience but it’s not until they get out there and really do it that they can see what it’s really like.”

Students from Gloucestershire may undertake work placements in a variety of locations across the world, including North America, Australasia and the Far East. One quarter of graduates return to find full-time positions with their placement providers.

The best hospitality schools in the world – which most certainly do insist on compulsory work placements – are targeted not just by hotel companies on recruitment drives, but by banks, media firms and luxury retail brands. Hospitality skills are valued elsewhere because they are people skills which are massively important to every service business.

It is a great frustration for our managers to see young people leave our industry before achieving their full potential. They may achieve it in another sector – fair enough – but as we are the custodians of our industry we are concerned about the loss.

The Institute of Hospitality has acted as the bridge between industry and academia for more than 75 years and we support and facilitate initiatives that strengthen relationships between educators and employers.

For example, we believe that teaching staff can benefit from ‘work placements’ just as much as students. Although the majority of hospitality lecturers have previously held positions in industry, given the speed with which the hotel sector is changing, returning to the workplace for short periods would be beneficial. This could happen in the summer months.

Secondly, businesses need to fully engage with their local college and/or university, not just by coming in to do recruitment-focused presentations, but also by assisting with the curriculum development and the teaching of modules within their remit of expertise. Some universities struggle to find enough industry representatives on their boards. Through the Institute of Hospitality’s extensive network of members, we can help match hotel owners and managers with their appropriate university.

This article first appeared in the April 2015 issue of Hotel Owner