Catering industry lacking soft skills

The catering industry was suffering from a major lack of soft skills, including poor attitude and lack of personality on the part of employees, according to a report on skills analysis and employment forecasts for the Maltese tourism industry commissioned by the Malta Tourism Authority.

Another issue was the poor perception of catering jobs, which could be scaring students away. It was not perceived as a career, the report noted.

A qualitative study, based on 46 restaurants and 22 hotels, it was carried out in 2004 but has been constantly updated, showing that the fundamental issues of the industry have persisted and are still valid today.

Carried out by the MTA's research department and funded by the EU, it was presented by tourism studies university students at the Tourism Studies Association's conference on Success Through Managing People: Enhancing HR Strategies In Tourism, held yesterday.

The students, Petra Anne Rizzo and Stephan Cassar, picked up on the MTA's report to focus on its catering aspect in their talk on Employment Gaps Within The Tourism Industry.

Highlighting the need to focus more on character development, they said the catering industry was also plagued by the fact that most of the frontliners were part-time workers, so hotels were not inclined to train them.

However, even part-time employees needed to be focused on, they said.

Job-specific skills needed to be developed, such as knowledge on wines, and were a means of motivating staff, while HR development should have one direction and goal notwithstanding the various stakeholders.

The need for a more integrated approach by tourism stakeholders was stressed by Anna Maria Darmanin, a consultant in HR development. All stakeholders needed to get together and seriously think about an integrated strategy, particularly to tackle the funding, she advised.

Stakeholders should sit together to see how to maximise the funds they were receiving, Ms Darmanin said, stressing on the need to decide together what funding for tourism should be targeted.

She asked what Malta was doing about the May 2 deadline to be able to access EU funding from a regional programme, where tourism-related projects could also be submitted.

Ms Darmanin said the good news for the tourism industry in the EU was that it would experience an employment growth of 15 per cent, which was expected to double within 25 years. The prospects for employment in the sector were therefore good, but the jobs were underpaid. She consoled the floor by saying that Europe shared similar problems to Malta's in tourism, including the high staff turnover and its bad image due to low salaries and long working hours.

Practical experience was no longer enough to be competitive, Ms Darmanin insisted, pointing out a major skills gap between the large companies and the smaller enterprises that made up 90 per cent of the industry.

Seasonality was another major problem that every country faced, and one way of tackling it would be by developing cultural and social tourism, she said.

Asking whether the product was improving despite the training, Ms Darmanin stressed enforcement, saying it was important to identify those who were "ruining our tourism".

She strongly suggested the setting up of a tourism sub-committee within the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development and within the Malta-EU Steering Action Committee.

The Parliamentary Secretary for Tourism, Mario de Marco, said the key to the success of the industry was to offer quality service by ensuring value for money.

Its biggest challenge was to attract and retain the right people, he said, adding that employers needed innovative and effective approaches to people management if the industry was to prosper.

"In an increasingly competitive world market, the way to increase efficiency, profitability and productivity is to attract and retain talented and committed people, who feel happy and motivated at their workplace," Dr de Marco said.

Statistics for 2007 showed that 10,171 full-timers and 8,635 part-timers were employed directly in tourism, he explained, praising the Industry HR Development Unit within the MTA for having been at the forefront of several activities that support tourism service culture and HR development.