Tourism education: what about entrepreneurial skills?

Abstract

Tourism is generally acknowledged as one of the economic sectors with higher growth prospects worldwide. As a consequence, the number of tourism education courses has grown significantly in the last decades in order to meet the demands of the qualified workforce. Nevertheless, students who enter this sector will need different skills to face the challenges of this highly competitive and demanding industry. In this case, entrepreneurial skills are of paramount importance. The aim of this paper was to understand the perspective of tourism students on the relevance of entrepreneurship education within their courses.

This study aims at describing an innovative teaching program called ‘Learning to be’, focused on fostering entrepreneurial attitudes and skills, through a project based learning methodology inspired in the Design Thinking process (Daniel et al., 2016). In this program, tourism students are challenged to develop viable solutions to real-case problems proposed by private and public organizations.

A feedback questionnaire was developed to verify the impact of the entrepreneurship education program on students. It allowed to conclude that from the tourism students' perspective the embeddedness of entrepreneurship education within their courses was considered very relevant to assess future employment prospects, being the students both employees or self-employed. Students had also acquired and enhanced non-cognitive skills which are most valued by the tourism industry. This case study was also pertinent to identify best practices and propose guidelines for creating curricular spaces for the development of entrepreneurial skills.