December was a busy month for the Future Skills Framework team, with three focus groups taking place across the country over the course of two weeks.
On December 3 and 4, 13 participants contributed their feedback in Vancouver. They worked on the development of 18 competencies across the domains of digital competence, compliance, and diversity and inclusion. The mixed expertise in the room included tourism professionals with backgrounds ranging from mountain guiding to canoe tours, as well as someone whose extensive experience included working at Canada’s very first McDonald’s. Their input helped validate a sizeable chunk of the framework. Combined with a great venue, it was an excellent way to kick off the month of Future Skills Framework focus groups.
Not a week later, two additional groups met in Halifax and Toronto, respectively. Fifteen experts in the realm of food and beverage service gathered in Nova Scotia, while Ontario saw a dozen general managers and owner/operators gather to share their insights. Over the course of two days, the parallel groups were able to validate many competencies relating to human resources, excellence in service delivery, finance, and the provision of food service.
Tourism HR Canada would like to thank every single participant for their hard work over the course of December.
The team will hold further sessions in 2020 to make sure the framework incorporates a broad range of feedback from industry; if you are a tourism professional who would like to be part of future-proofing the sector’s labour market, please join our network of experts by completing this short survey.
These focus group sessions contributed towards the Future Skills Framework, a multi-year project aiming to develop a comprehensive framework to redress the skills and labour mismatches in tourism, while aiding job seekers, educators, and governments to better understand the skills and competencies employers are looking for. To learn more about the project, click here.