Abstract
The present study aims to examine the hospitality management education system in Ghana and report the initial findings of a qualitative research undertaken for an assessment of the hospitality education system. The views of graduates and students were gathered through in-depth interviews on the hospitality education that they have received. The findings of the study show that the curriculums used by hospitality students in the Polytechnics are overloaded with non-hospitality related subjects. Most of the interviewees felt that they have gained adequate theoretical knowledge and practical skills in the area of food production operation, food and beverage service with little practical knowledge in other subjects. The implication is if the current curricula run by departments of hospitality in the Polytechnics are not reviewed on timely bases, st hospitality management graduates from Polytechnics may not meet the needs of industries in this 21 century.
 Keywords: Training; hospitality management; education; qualitative research; curriculum.
Highlights
The responsibility for developing serviceoriented human resources lies with the hospitality organisations and with the structure of a country's hospitality management education delivery
The respondent's views about the hospitality education that they had received, one of the most interesting outcomes of the survey, are that there were no significant differences between the responses from the respondents who completed and those who were about to complete
Tourism and hospitality education in Ghana started in 1990s when the government of Ghana realized the immense contributions that tourism makes to the economic development of the country
Summary
The responsibility for developing serviceoriented human resources lies with the hospitality organisations and with the structure of a country's hospitality management education delivery. For customers to be satisfied through the delivery of quality services by skilled and competent staff, an effective hospitality education system needs to exist. A large number of authors contributed articles to tourism management which examined the issues of hospitality and tourism education (Richards and Ryan, 1999). Buam (2000) argues that education is for professionals and training is for the artisan and the unskilled. According to Buam, by the end of the 20th century, it had been widely recognised that education could not be considered as a finite and terminal activity, and training too could not be considered as a strictly on-the-job, on-going, non-terminal process
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