Tourism HR Canada’s Research Advisory Council will bring together key players from across the tourism ecosystem two to four times a year, to ensure labour market intelligence and general research activities continue to meet the sector’s needs. Tourism HR Canada recently reconvened the dormant Council on the recommendation of the Board of Directors.
The first meeting of the new Council was held virtually in November. As well as tackling administrative and governance matters, the meeting was an opportunity for the research team at Tourism HR Canada to review its work from the past three years, and to present its plans for the next funding cycle.
Members engaged in robust discussion of priorities and areas of concern for the sector, highlighting the key role the Council will play in supporting research projects. A need for greater coherence and consistency across key tourism organizations, and much more organized cooperation and collaboration, were foregrounded as structural challenges facing the work that Tourism HR Canada, and its network of partners, do.
Some of the key themes that emerged through conversation include:
- Productivity: How is productivity measured in tourism (and in service sectors more generally)? How can workforce development drive improvements in productivity? What are the roles of the various tourism ecosystem bodies in supporting businesses through the next period of economically choppy waters?
- Artificial Intelligence: How will AI disrupt the tourism sector? What impact will technological transformation have on products and services, and what are the skills gaps the workforce will have to overcome? How can AI tools be leveraged to support small and medium enterprises in particular?
- Workforce modelling: How does the tourism workforce interact with demands from other sectors? What are the infrastructure and social constraints on worker mobility, training opportunities, and fundamental challenges such as housing and health care? What are the local labour conditions necessary to support the development of tourism in rural and remote areas?
- Foundational LMI for the sector: What are the current data gaps in our LMI system (e.g., immigration, coverage of the territories…) and how they be filled? How can economic and labour metrics of the sector be more easily and accessibly reconciled? What are the best strategies and tools for dissemination and sharing? How should LMI inform policy recommendations and advocacy efforts?
- Data literacy: How can we ensure transparency and consistency in the tourism and labour data in public discourse? What are the different definitions of ‘tourism’ that are currently in circulation? What tools are needed to support organizations new to research in working with publicly available and customized data?
- Research fatigue: How can we (as researchers) better engage with operators, employers, and employees to maintain the high standards of research needed to inform policy and planning decisions? How do we overcome the understandable survey fatigue that is driving down response rates? How can we rationalize our research efforts across organizations?
The Council will report to the Board of Directors on research and LMI initiatives, but it will also serve as direct support to those research initiatives. In particular, members will provide feedback on current and planned research efforts, identify priorities for Tourism HR Canada, review methodologies and protocols, and support both research recruitment activities and dissemination efforts. It will also serve as a mechanism for greater collaboration between Council member organizations, fostering a more productive research landscape and reducing duplication of efforts and resources across the research ecosystem.
The next Council meeting will take place in late spring or early summer. Stay tuned for more updates via Tourism HR Insider.
The Terms of Reference and current membership of the Council are available here.