Soft skills empowering for a successful career in tourism administration

Abstract

Employers currently emphasise primarily the importance of the personal and social characteristics of employees, and focus less on their professional and business skills. Contrarily, employees often consider deep professional knowledge and skills to be their key strengths, and pay little attention to personal growth and the development of personal characteristics. The aim of the research is to compare the soft skills most frequently required by potential employers in job advertisements for the position of administrator to the employee soft skills predominantly identified by the students on the Tourism Administration course. A study designed to identify employer expectations was conducted in 2019 and 2021. In order to determine the opinions of students in 2021, a written questionnaire survey of higher education students on the Tourism Administration course was conducted. The analysis of the opinions of students, and an examination of employer expectations, demonstrate that employer expectations regarding the skills of potential employees, especially personal or soft skills, and student opinions, do not always match. The impact of the pandemic created a paradoxical situation in the labour market: before the pandemic, progressively more attention was being paid to employees’ soft skills; in the post-pandemic world and working in a hybrid way in the labour market, not all personal skills remain important.