The Future of Education

ICT applications have revolutionized civil society and have also changed the requirements and competence needs in traditional jobs and industries.  Tourism, one of the major economic sectors in Europe and biggest providers of jobs on the planet boasts a greater array of heterogeneous stakeholders than other industries and has been particularly affected by these changes.  The accelerating and synergistic interaction between technology and tourism has transformed the nature of tourism products, processes, business and competition.

Accordingly, a lack of well trained professionals in the field of e-Tourism is obvious, as reported by Insights.org.uk. To fill this gap it is important to define the new skills needed in the new and traditional tourism jobs so that suitable training measures can be developed to cover the competence needs in the e-tourism sector.   Given the fact that professional mobility is particularly high in the tourism industry, this problem must be tackled from a European perspective, so that employability of e-tourism specialists across Europe can be facilitated.  Against this background,  eight partner organisations from six European countries are working on the EC co-funded project “e-Tourism Framework”, (e-TF) with the intention to identify new Role Profiles for e-Tourism Functions at European level and develop Training Guidelines to support VET Institutions in providing market near training for these e-tourism jobs roles  in line with ECVET and the European qualification framework, so that employability in these jobs can be fostered not only at national, but even at European level.  By now, the e-TF team has identified and defined the Competence Profiles for five core e-Tourism Functions:

•        e-Tourism Content Curator

•        e-Tourism Destination Manager

•        e-Tourism Marketing Specialist

•        e-Tourism Revenue Manager

•        e-Tourism Online Reputation

The e-Tourism Profiles describe the key knowledge, competences and skills that high qualified professionals should have in order to succeed in the field of e-Tourism according to the needs of the labour market.  Vocational Educational and Training institutions are crucial to contribute to the increase of skilled professionals around Europe for this specific sector; thus, VETs are the main beneficiaries of the Role Profiles.  Companies and individuals can also make use of the e-Tourism Profiles in order to assessing potential employees and/or self-assessing.

The profiles are available on the project website http://www.etourism-project.eu/