Tourism and Hospitality Workforce Development Strategy

Background

Successful tourism and hospitality businesses depend first and foremost on the people at the coalface. People deliver a world-class visitor experience. Tourism Australia is committed to attracting high yielding visitors to Australia and this coupled with an increasingly demanding domestic consumer means that now more than ever the industry must deliver a premium experience.

This requires a strategy that does more than simply ‘puts a body’ in front of customers.

Employers across the industry, large and small, face the same challenge—to attract and keep people with the right skills and personal attitudes and attributes to deliver a quality experience. However, there are labour and skills shortages in a number of occupations and regions in the tourism and hospitality industry. These shortages cannot be simply attributed to demographic changes, a growing economy or blamed on an education and training system delivering insufficient numbers. Industry and regional structures, business size, workplace conditions, and the mobility of workers are all contributing to these shortages and these are likely to continue for the next two decades. Staff shortages, inadequate skills and knowledge and/or high turnover can impede the ability of a hotel or other tourism business to deliver quality service.*

Strategy

This workforce development strategy has been developed by industry, together with the industry skills council, and represents a commitment from industry to work together. The strategy is an important step in continuing to address the skills and labour shortages in the tourism and hospitality industry.

The Tourism and Hospitality Workforce Development Strategy outlines the priority areas for achieving the overall goal of access to the number of skilled employees that the tourism and hospitality industry will require to be successful in the future.

These include:

1. A highly skilled workforce

2. Expanding the traditional workforce

3. Access to quality workplaces

4. Better workforce planning

For more on the Workforce Development Strategy please click here.

* Excerpt from the Tourism and Hospitality Workforce Development Strategy.

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