Abstract
The tourism sector is one of the most promising parts of the kingdom's diversification efforts, and its Vision 2030 envisages the tourism sector to be a major contributor to job creation, given the government's aim of increasing the number of jobs in the tourism sector by almost 50 percent to 1.5 million by 2020. Many employers today are finding that recent graduates of Saudi Arabia are unprepared to succeed in the workforce because they lack foundational “soft skills.” While technical skills are often industry-specific, soft skills such as professional communication, employers value critical thinking, collaboration, and time management across sectors. Soft skills should be given priority as these play an important role in the tourism sector as these competencies are of indispensable nature. Education institutes need to play a pivotal role in imparting them along with an education to manage tourist destination. This paper is a conceptual paper. It is based on the personal experiences of the authors and the opinions of other subject experts. Data has been collected from various sources like articles, newspapers, websites, reports, journals etc. Research proves that soft skills are essential skills for any of the individuals to excel in the upcoming sectors in Saudi Arabia. In order to achieve 2030 Vision, soft skills can act as a powerful tool in the hands of young aspirants.
Highlights
As in previous research in other countries, the findings suggest that tourism employers tend to see personal qualities and interpersonal competencies as very relevant for the field, while technical competencies are seen generally as somehow less important
Research proves that soft skills are essential skills for any of the individuals to excel in the upcoming sectors in Saudi Arabia
These are the skills that will make young students ready to be employed. These are in scarcity and necessary steps should be taken by the education bodies to impart such skills among the students like communication, planning problem solving, leadership etc
Summary
Jobs in the sector mostly require people with high variety of soft skills and expertise in handling a tourist, which is the heart and foundation of tourism.The visitors should be given a warm welcome and a memorable experience by well trained and qualified workforce as tourism sells experiencesCity and Guilds Group survey in partnership with Change board (2017) “Building the talent pipeline in. Saudi Arabia”, revealed that the skills most difficult to find are job-specific skills (65%); leadership skills (62%); soft skills (35%); strategic insight and planning (29%); communication skills (24%); IT skills (18%); and customer service skills (12%). In order to achieve Vision 2030, necessary actions must be taken to enrich the future and present workforce with the desired skills so that objectives of Vision 2030 can be achieved
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