By Thapelo Molefe
Tourism businesses are being forced to train students from scratch because some university courses are failing to equip learners with the practical skills needed to work in the industry, Southern Africa Tourism Services Association (Satsa) national chairperson Oupa Pilane says.
Pilane, who is also co-founder and director of the Graskop Gorge Lift Company, said the disconnect between what universities teach and what tourism businesses need was making it harder for the sector to bring young people into the workforce, while placing an additional burden on already stretched entrepreneurs.
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“Unfortunately, what we are looking for, we are looking for people to run our enterprises. And the current modules that we have are not helping us to do that,” he said.
Speaking to Inside Education at the Mpumalanga Tourism Expo in Mbombela, Pilane called on universities and other tertiary institutions to work directly with the tourism sector when developing their courses.
“We’ve repeatedly asked tertiary institutions to say, sit with us as the sector. And let us advise you on what our needs are,” Pilane said.
He said businesses wanted interns and graduates who could apply their knowledge immediately instead of requiring employers to start their training from the beginning.
“All I want, whether it’s an intern, I want a plug and play,” he said.
Pilane said the problem was evident in different areas of the industry.
“I’ve got a good chef who can’t cost. Yeah, you cook nice food, but you can’t cost a plate,” he said.
He said a similar problem emerged when he took students from Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) into the adventure tourism environment.
“They have introduced an adventure module there. I took some of the kids. I had to show them from scratch what to do,” Pilane said.
He said the students were unable to perform the work when they arrived, requiring the business to provide additional training.
“I took students from TUT, they couldn’t do anything. They were standing like me there because they just couldn’t do anything,” he said.
Pilane said this showed why universities needed to consult businesses before introducing specialised tourism courses.
“The problem is that when they were developing that module of tourism they never sat with tourism, with adventure people around,” he said.
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He said businesses were willing to take in students but could not continually carry the cost of teaching basic practical skills that should be addressed through training.
“So in between, as much as we really need to be able to bring in the students and everything, is that it ends up being an extra work for the already stretched entrepreneur, because now we must begin to teach them from scratch,” Pilane said.
The skills gap, he said, was also contributing to a shortage of South Africans with the management skills needed to run tourism businesses, particularly among people from previously disadvantaged communities.
“One of the biggest challenges that South Africa has is management skills in the tourism sector. We have very few South Africans that can be managers, especially from the previously disadvantaged communities,” Pilane said.
He said Mpumalanga had agreed on a target that businesses should not employ more than 15% non-South Africans, with foreign workers expected to bring specific skills into the sector.
Pilane said the shortage of suitably skilled South Africans could result in foreign nationals filling some management positions.
“So you then find that you will then have a lot of Mozambicans in those positions or a lot of Zimbabweans in particular in those positions,” he said.
Pilane said addressing the skills shortage was part of a bigger challenge facing Mpumalanga as the province sought to turn its tourism attractions into sustainable economic activity and jobs.
He said young people were already participating in the tourism sector, but more deliberate platforms were needed to connect them with tourism opportunities.
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One area he identified was content creation, saying young people could be used more intentionally to market tourism destinations.
Pilane said the sector had engaged the Bushbuckridge Local Tourism Organisation on bringing content creators into tourism as an economic activity rather than treating content creation as something that happened incidentally when people visited attractions.
“We want to involve young people. Young people are involved in the tourism sector. We may think that they may not. They are involved,” he said.
