TOP 30 SOFT SKILLS IN TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY GRADUATES: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

Purpose – To improve the employability of tourism and hospitality (T&H) graduates, faculty must continually reassess what soft skills are essential for T&H graduates to possess and amend their curricula to meet these needs. Thus, this study aims to identify the soft skills perceived as essential for the T&H graduates through a systematic literature review (SLR). Methodology – Google Scholar was systematically queried from 1990 to April 2018, resulting in 77 T&H soft skills-related peer-reviewed publications. Four T&H researchers/educators produced an initial pool of 1447 T&H soft skills from these publications, categorized them in either conceptual/creative, leadership or interpersonal dimensions of Sandwith’s (1993) Competency Domain Model and trimmed for relevance. Finally, the elicited key soft skills were further edited via an online survey of 19 T&H researchers/educators from Italy, Malta, Portugal, and Spain. The relevance of generated soft skills was double-verified thought same SLR based process for literature from April 2018 onwards. Findings – A final set of 30 items emerged – 10 items per each of the three soft skills dimensions – i.e. conceptual/creative, leadership, and interpersonal. Based on these findings, both T&H higher education institutions and faculty should evaluate their classes/curricula to determine whether a particular soft skill identified in this study is included as a learning objective of one or more specific classes. Contribution – The main contribution lies in devising a theoretically-and methodologically-based list of key soft skills for a broad range of segments of the T&H industry. From a methodological point of view, the SLR conducted is considered as novelty in T&H soft skills research. Practically, this study provides educators with an updated benchmark tool to identify gaps in the curriculum. The related positive implications are expected for the students and T&H industry as well.