Competence Development on Tourism Marketing Management Study Program through Soft Skills Improvement

Competence Development on Tourism Marketing Management Study Program through Soft Skills Improvement Vanessa Gaffar, HP Diyah Setiyorini Tourism Marketing Management Study Program, Faculty of Social Studies Education, Indonesia University of Education Jl. Dr. Setiabudhi No. 229 Bandung Indonesia vanessa_gaffar.upi.edu Abstract To accelerate the enhancement of fulfilling the needs of qualified Indonesian tourism HR, many higher education institutions have developed tourism science study programs. Indonesia University of Education (UPI) also has contribution to develop tourism science in opening Tourism Marketing Study Program. The Study Program is quite different from the former tourism schools that have been developed in Indonesia. The former emphasized more in vocational skills, where as the later offers a graduate program to fulfill the needs of managerial skills at the tourism industry. Hence, to achieve this objective, the study program s learning method is not only expected to enhance the students academic competence on the concept and theory of hospitality and tourism. It also attempts to develop vocational competence that contains aspects, such as knowledge, attitude, and skills that are required by the hospitality and tourism industry. Thus, there are three competences that are developed in the study program: 1) Core Competence - the major competence for students and graduates to have strong marketing skills, adaptive, professional, and have a good attitude in tourism industry; 2) Supporting Competence - the soft skills competence that makes students and graduates having better interpersonal skills as well as intrapersonal skills; 3) Other Related Competence the competence of specific hard skills that required by the hospitality and tourism industry, such as hotel occupation competences, food and beverage occupation competence, and destination occupations competence. One of the competences that play an important thing to develop tourism HR is soft skills (supporting competence) development. It is proposed that by having soft skills integrated to its learning method, the graduates would be able to sustain at the hospitality and tourism industry workplace and work in the sectors professionally. It is very hard and sometimes stressful to the students who would enter to the industry, since the workplace is very dynamic, involving with an excessive contact of different people, having long working hours and willing to work on holidays. Hence, developing tourism human resources need more attention in the soft skills improvement to prepare the students to enter the industry. There are two areas that are developed in improving soft skills: 1) Interpersonal skills - the ability for students to manage themselves, such as time management, self motivation, self learning, etc. 2) Intrapersonal skills - the ability of the students to communicate and to build relationship with their working partners. Hence it is important to evaluate how students have accomplished soft skills that are required by the tourism industry. Therefore, it needs a research that would attempt to discover the requirement of soft skills in the hospitality and tourism industry, the performance of students at the workplace, and the model of learning method to enhance the soft skills improvement. Thus, the topic of this research is Competence Development on Tourism Marketing Management Study Program through Soft Skills Improvement. Keywords: Hospitality and Tourism Competency, Soft Skills Development, Hospitality and Tourism Industry, Interpersonal Skills, Intrapersonal Skills. 154

1 Introduction Tourism has played as a main trigger for economic development in most countries in the world. Not only that it could give great contribution to the countries national income, but also it could foster the social welfare to the country. As a service industry, tourism is also called as a people industry because it depends a lot on its human resources who give services to tourists. Therefore, tourism HR plays as an important thing to leverage a country s competitive advantage in developing tourism. To accelerate the enhancement of fulfilling the needs of qualified Indonesian tourism HR, many higher education institutions have developed tourism science study programs. Indonesia University of Education (UPI) also has contribution to develop tourism science in opening Tourism Marketing Study Program. The Study Program is quite different from the former tourism schools that have been developed in Indonesia. The former emphasized more in vocational skills, where as the later offers a graduate program to fulfill the needs of managerial skills at the tourism industry. Hence, to achieve this objective, the study program s learning method is not only expected to enhance the students academic competence on the concept and theory of hospitality and tourism. It also attempts to develop vocational competence that contains aspects, such as knowledge, attitude, and skills that are required by the hospitality and tourism industry. Thus, there are three competences that are developed in the study program: 1) Core Competence - the major competence for students and graduates to have strong marketing skills, adaptive, professional, and have a good attitude in tourism industry; 2) Supporting Competence - the soft skills competence that makes students and graduates having better interpersonal skills as well as intrapersonal skills; 3) Other Related Competence the competence of specific hard skills that required by the hospitality and tourism industry, such as hotel occupation competences, food and beverage occupation competence, and destination occupations competence. One of the competences that play an important thing to develop tourism HR is soft skills (supporting competence) development. It is proposed that by having soft skills integrated to its learning method, the graduates would be able to sustain at the hospitality and tourism industry workplace and work in the sectors professionally. It is very hard and sometimes stressful to the students who would enter to the industry, since the workplace is very dynamic, involving with an excessive contact of different people, having long working hours and willing to work on holidays. Hence, developing tourism human resources need more attention in the soft skills improvement to prepare the students to enter the industry. There are two areas that are developed in improving soft skills: 1) Interpersonal skills - the ability for students to manage themselves, such as time management, self motivation, self learning, etc. 2) Intrapersonal skills - the ability of the students to communicate and to build relationship with their working partners. Improving soft skills could be gained by several activities for the students. Those activities were integrated on the learning method that was implemented by the study programs. The activities are 1) conducting tasks collectively, as well as, individually; 2) presenting the seminar or tasks in front of the class to develop the communication skills; 3) having field study program that contains survey to people as respondent, so that they learn to build relationship with new people; 4) participating on tourism industrial job training; 5) Pre-departure lectures for industrial job training sharing experience from practitioners; 6) Industry orientation Program 7) Evaluation on each activities periodically for the improvement. From those activities, there is one program that students performance is evaluated not only from lecturers but also from the industry. The program called industrial job training where students should participated in a kind of apprenticeship or internship for 4-6 months in hospitality and tourism industry. Prior to departure of the industrial job training program, the students were given a pre departure lectures and industry orientation program. Those activities are expected to improve students competence, especially on their soft skills. Workplace atmosphere is very different to the campus atmosphere. At the working situation, students are expected to be independent and mature. The performance is not only evaluated by their subordinate but also the customer or other stakeholders on the industry. Hence, the true competence of the students could be evaluated more comprehensively. So that, in order to 155

understand how far the improvement of the students competence and soft skills, the industry evaluation on the students performance during their apprenticeship could be considered as the tool of evaluation of students competence. Hence it is important to evaluate how students have accomplished soft skills that are required by the hospitality and tourism industry. Therefore, the research was conducted to answer some research questions, as follow: 1. What kind of activities that could be implemented in developing soft skills for students? 2. How is the development of soft skills performance of the students at the workplace? 3. How to establish a model on soft skills improvement to develop the students competence in Tourism Marketing Management Study Program? 2 Literature Background This research would attempt to evaluate the students competency at the workplace during their industrial job training because Neill, 1978; Lowry & Flohr, 2005 suggested that competencybased education is the transformation process from a young person into a life-learner in the workforce. Based on Cecil, Fu, Jones (2010) research on Monitoring Student Success: A Systemic Model For Hospitality And Tourism Education on International CHRIE Conference- Refereed, University of Massachusetts, There are some researches and studies about competencies in hospitality and tourism industry. Below are their literature study on the competencies. In a 2004 study conducted by Dopson and Tas entitled A practical approach to curriculum development: A case study noted that in developing curriculum, educators must consider three major components of hospitality education: substantive knowledge, skills and values (Gursoy & Swanger, 2005, p. 46). The questions concerning to kind of competencies that were required by hospitality and tourism industry have attracted many researchers to study. Christou (2002) suggested the tourism and hospitality curriculum should equip students with important management knowledge and skills. Christou (2002) carried out a study to find competencies in hospitality industry by asking hotel managers and tourism graduates in Greece to rank 36 competencies for management trainees. The results shows that the top three competencies of hospitality and tourism are managing guest problems with understanding and sensitivity, demonstrating professional appearance and poise, and developing positive relations. He continued the study to different countries, U.S. and Europe. The comparison shows that, the most imperative competency is the ability to manage customer service problems. This finding was confirmed by Annaraud (2006) who studied skills necessary for successful careers for American and Russian hospitality graduates. Her findings indicated that customer relations were listed by students and faculty in both countries as one of the top three skills. In a 2002 study Dopson and Nelson found the most important skills and abilities for hospitality related positions were leadership, cost control, positive customer relations, identifying and solving managerial problems, crisis management, and solving customer problems. Additionally, Gursoy and Swanger (2005) investigated what course content areas are perceived as required by hospitality professionals. They collected 328 surveyed completed by professionals working in various segments of the hospitality industry. The results show that the five highest ranked course content areas are oral communication skills, leadership skills, a clear understanding of profit and loss statement, good work habits, and customer service skills. Gursoy and Swanger (2005) found that industry professionals do not expect a curriculum that teaches students specific applications because of the varying segments in the industry, company cultures, and operational procedures. Therefore, a curriculum should focus on developing higherorder concepts so that students will be wellrounded graduates. Thus, they proposed that content areas such as communication skills, customer service skills, and work ethics need to be embedded 156

in the majority of courses in a curriculum to allow students develop those skills continuously throughout their college education. Based on studies that compiled by Cecil, Fu, and Jones (2010), it could be perceived that the competencies of hospitality and tourism emphasized on how students and graduates would be able to build relationship and having interaction with people. Thus, there are needs to focus on soft skills improvement for the students. According to Gregson & Bettis, (1991), technical skills unlike soft skills, do not easily lead to recognition, promotion and other opportunities. Termination in employment and failure in promotion amongst employees were always caused by human behaviours that usually reflected from inadequate work value or poor attitude rather than because of deficiencies in job skills or technical knowledge In other words, lack of soft skills is more likely to get an individual s employment terminated than lack of cognitive or technological skills. Bennett et al. (2000) defined soft skills as those skills which can support study in any discipline and also skills that have the potential to be transferred to a range of contexts, education and workplace. Hence, it could be set that soft skills consist of how individual managed himself/herself and how he/she managed the interaction among others. 3 Research Method The research method is qualitative and descriptive survey. The data were gathered by an interview to managers on the industry that has been employed the students as their apprentice during the industrial job training period. The data were collected from the 10 managers (Training Managers or Line Managers) of Hotels, Restaurants, Travel Agents, Professional Convention Organizer (PCO), and Tourism Government Institutions. Another instrument is the collection of scoring result from the manager of the industry concerning to the job training program. They were 100 students who have worked at 100 tourism business entities during the two period of the job training program. The students are from the first batch of Tourism Marketing Management Study Program (Class of 2005) and the second one (Class of 2006). 4 Research Result Soft skills improvement could be seen when the students underwent the real working situation. The Tourism Marketing Management study program facilitates this activity by implementing industrial job training program for students. The study program also has preparation activities that emphasize on the soft skills development before the students were sent to the industry. There activities are as follow: 1) Establishing concentration classes to provide knowledge and skills on certain tourism business expertise. The concentration classes are Hotel Marketing Management, Food and Beverage Marketing Management, and Destination Marketing Management. Each class concentrates on providing hard skills as well as soft skills that are needed to the spesicif tourism industry. On the class students are given tasks individually, as well as, in group to understand specific problems on each tourism business. The tasks contribute to 20% on the students total marks; 2) Presenting a seminar or tasks in front of the class to develop the communication skills. The objectives of this condition are for improving students performance on public speaking, giving them understanding of being well-prepared, being able to face different opinion from people, building sense of team work in organizing the seminar, etc.; 3) Conducting field study program that contains distributing questionnaire to people as the respondent. It helps them to build relationship with new people, building a strategy in starting a new relationship; 157

4) Pre-departure program for industrial job training. In this program, the students will have to take practice and training with the hard skills. For the soft skills improvement, the study program invites hospitality and tourism practitioners to share work experience for the students. These activities were improved from time to time. The research result shows that there was an improvement on the performance of students from Class of 2005 to the class of 2006. The study program has learnt from the experience of Class 2005 when they implemented the job training program for improvement the next implementation. The improvements were shown on the length of time of the pre departure training and the content of each training program. The data have showed that the evaluation score of the students performance at the workplace has increased. The evaluation was done by the managers at the workplace based on the three aspects, such as: job skills performance, interpersonal skills, and intrapersonal skills. The result show that in average the students intrapersonal skills, the way students working with others is higher than job skills and interpersonal skills, as stated to the graphic below: 3.65 3.55 3.45 3.35 3.40 Graphic 1 The Competence Comparison Between Class of 2005 and Class of 2006 3.44 3.54 3.49 3.46 3.47 3.44 3.46 3.43 3.25 Job Skills Intrapersonal Skills Interpersonal Skills Class of 2005 Class of 2006 Average Graphic 1 describe that students from class 2006 has been improved the score in every aspects, especially in interpersonal skills. Working in a team and building good relationship to other people could be able to make them sustain at the workplace. The highest score from the interpersonal skills aspect is courtesy. The managers evaluated that the students courtesy were excellence, this was resulted from the academic atmosphere that implemented in the campus that emphasized on character building and respects to people. 158

3.65 3.55 3.45 3.35 3.25 3.15 Graphics 2 The Competence Comparison Between Class of 2005 and Class of 2006 3.54 3.47 3.37 3.48 3.47 3.60 Teamwork Communication Courtesy Class of 2005 Class of 2006 Intrapersonal Skills However, data have indicated that the students communication skills should be improved because the score than lower than other aspects. Some managers suggested that students ability in speaking English should be improved. The students were also expected to be more confident in public speaking. The interpersonal skills score was lower than the intrapersonal skills and the aspect of grooming need to be improved, as it is shown in graphics as follow: 3.65 3.55 3.45 3.35 3.25 Graphic 3 The Competence Comparison Between Class of 2005 and Class of 2006 3.47 3.48 3.40 3.40 3.48 3.51 Grooming Attendance Motivation Interpersonal Skills Class of 2005 Class of 2006 The data shows that the grooming aspects had the lowest score. On the other hand, the motivation gained the highest score. The study program actually has been developed grooming standard for the students, such as giving the students uniform, informing the students with hygiene and sanitation for grooming and others. However, it was very hard to implement the standard at the campus because students from other departments at the university didn t use uniforms and had more casual outfits. However the study program attempted to increase this aspect. The job skills aspect has the lowest score from the two aspects mentioned before as it is shown on the Graphic 4. As a bachelor degree study program, the study program realized that it had more emphasized on the academic or theory development for the students. However, if the students were having their job training or even working at the industry, they had to know the practical or technical skills of certain job. 159

3.65 3.55 3.45 3.35 3.25 3.15 Graphic 4 The Competence Comparison Between Class of 2005 and Class of 2006 3.44 3.45 3.41 3.45 3.43 3.36 Job Knowledge Job Quality Job Quantity Class of 2005 Class of 2006 Job Skills On the industrial job training, not all students were having positions in the marketing department, though they have studied marketing management at the campus. Some of them were put on the food and beverage service, front office, and reservation at the hotel; ground handling service at the airlines industry; liaison officer and data processing at the Professional Conference Organizer; ticketing staff and tour guide at the travel agent or tourists attractions, such as museums, theme parks, and others. Graphic 5 shows the composition of industry on the industrial job training program. 160

Graphic 5 Industry Compositions for the Industrial Job Training Program Hotel Tourists Attraction Government Travel Agent Restaurant Museum PCO 9% 7% 6% 4% 18% 16% 39% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% Hotel has big proportion on the composition. Students who had taken the hotel marketing management, as well as, FB marketing management as their concentration could take hotel as their workplace. On the other hand, students who had taken the destination marketing management could choose tourists attractions, tourism government institution, travel agent, museums or PCO. Hence, it is showed that hotel and FB concentration s students have a focus and specific skills learned. However, the students that take destination marketing concentration learn a broader aspect because their workplace is very various. From the interview, it was discovered that most students were able to work independently at the workplace. Most managers said that the students could get along with other workers and have ability to learn fast at work. Some managers said that during the first month, the students have shown some difficulties at the workplace, especially when the job required technical skills. Sometimes the students ability was not as good as those from the vocational school. Another situation was that on the first month, the students had a rather high absenteeism. Sometimes, they were also late at work or not present at all. However, after the first month, the performance of the students was getting better. This result has show that on the first month, students need to adapt with the situation. Some students had the Job Training outside their usual place, so they need to adapt with the climate, area condition, working rhythmic and local custom. The distribution of students workplace is shown on Graphic 6. For example, students that live in Bandung could not cope with the climate in Jakarta and its hustle bustle on the traffic when they first came to the place. Sometimes they got ill and could not go to work. This situation annoyed the managers because sometimes during their absence, the students left their responsibility at the office. When this situation happened usually the managers would discussed to the students to solve the problem and find the solution that would increase the students productivity at the workplace. However, if the situation were getting tougher, the manager would return the students to the campus as the punishment. The students wouldn t have the final score and they should start the job training program on the next semester at different location. However, this Tourism Marketing Study Program never had this situation. 161

Graphic 6 Distribution of Workplace Bandung Jakarta West Java Sumatera Central Java and East Java Overseas 7% 3% 2% 18% 11% 59% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% Thus from the research findings, it could be concluded that the model of competence development through soft skills improvement in tourism marketing management study program is as follow: Core Competence Development Job Skills Other Specific Competence Development Supporting Competence Development Interpersonal Skills Industrial Job Training Program Evaluation Intrapersonal Skills Curricullum Competence and Soft Skills Competence and Soft Skills Assessment Feed back for Improvement The study program developed its curriculum by integrating competency development as stated in the model to gain the competence and soft skills for the students. The competency then would be assessed in the industrial job training program by the industry. The study program would use the evaluation result to evaluate the programs and the result would be used to develop curriculum. This process required to be continuously implemented. 5 Conclusion The soft skills are important for students at the hospitality and tourism higher education schools because when they graduated and worked at the industry, the skills would sustain their 162

existence. The way to develop soft skills emphasized not only from the curriculum and learning at the class. The students need to experience the real working condition. The Tourism Marketing Study Program facilitates this need by implementing the industrial job training program. In this program, students are not just expected to implement their knowledge and skills learnt from the class, they also have to understand how to build relationship with other people, adapting to new situations, and motivate themselves to success. The research on the soft skills improvement in the Tourism Marketing Study Program showed that the intrapersonal skills of the students are better than the interpersonal skills and job skills. So, the study program is challenged to have better improvement on the two skills. This research has limitation that could be studied further, such as in the study of the content of soft skills development, the competency assessment method of for the students, and also the curriculum development technique in improving the competence for students in the hospitality and tourism industry. Otherwise, the method that implemented today shows the good result because some students that have job training at industries then were employed as permanent workers. This shows a strong recognition on the students skills that matched to the industrial criteria. Thus, it also should be carried out more researches on the performance of the graduates that has already worked at the industry for better improvement. Reference Baum, Tom., 1995., Managing Human Resources in the European Tourism and Hospitality Industry A Strategic Approach, Chapman & Hall, Great Britain. Bennett, N., Dunne, E., & Carre', C. (2000). Skill Development in Higher Education and Employment. Buckingham: Open University Press. Bernardine, John H. & Joyce Russel EA, 1993, Human Resource Management, An Experiental Approach, McGraw Hill, Singapore. Breen, H., Walo, M. and Dimmock, K. 2004. Assessment Of Tourism And Hospitality Management Competencies: A Student Perspective. in Smith, K.A. and Schott, C. (2004) eds Proceedings of the New Zealand Tourism and Hospitality Research Conference 2004. Wellington, 8-10 December. pp. 22-34. http://www.vms.vuw.ac.nz/vuw/fca/vms/files/aa9.pdf. Burke, W, 1995, Competency Based Education and Training, The Falmer Press, Great Britain. Campbell, Andrew & Kathleen Somers Luchs, 1997, Core Competency-Based Strategy, International Thomson Business Press, UK. Cecil, Amanda Kay, Yao-Yi Fu Y, Elizabeth Jones Z., 2010. Monitoring Student Success: A Systemic Model for Hospitality and Tourism Education. International CHRIE Conference- Refereed. University of Massachusetts. USA Cooper, Christopher, 2000, Principle of Tourism, Mcgraw Hill, London. Dittmer, Paul R. & Gerald G. Griffin, 1997, Dimensions of The Hospitality Industry An Introduction, 2 nd Edition, Van Nostrand Reinhold, USA. Gregson, J. A., & Bettis, P. J. (1991). Secondary Trade and Industrial Education Work Values Instruction: Emancipatory of Indoctrinational? Paper presented at the AVERA Research on the Vocational Teachers Session, American Vocational Association Annual Convention. From http://eric.ed.gov/ericdocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/2 3/bf/b3.pdf Mayaka Melphon and Brian King. 2004. A Quality Assessment of Education and Training for Kenya s Tour-operating Sector. http://www.commerce.otago.ac.nz/tourism/currentissues/homepage.htm Milkovich/Boudreaux, 1997, Human Resource Management. 8 th Edition. Irwin Book Team. USA. 163

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