Human Resource Development in Tourism: Developing a Training Strategy for Increasing Employability

Tourism is a growth industry and a major creator of value added, the industry is vulnerable to a variety of economic, ecological, geopolitical and meteorological factors, which shape the nature of its labour force. The fact that it is difficult to maintain high permanent staffing levels has led to a generic tendency to operate on the basis of a limited core staff and to employ the labour needed for day-to-day operations under atypical contractual arrangements, because of which the economic rents from continuous learning and experience of the staff are lost to a great extent. Added to this are other constraints like long, anti-social working hours, low pay, low job status, etc, which collectively make employment within the industry appear unattractive to many. This paper briefly outlines the human resources problems faced by the tourism industry in India and against this background the authors propose a tourism training strategy model for enhancing employability in India. There is a pressing need to develop a common minimum standard to upgrade skills to acceptable level and facilitate cross national tourism. Capacity building to increase awareness, value and skills for the creation, development and implementation of sustainable tourism projects assume a much greater importance today.