Abstract:

The tourism product must include, as first part of its competitiveness to the people, either as performers or as cultural environment’s members. For the School of Tourism at University of Colima (Mexico), the human factor represents not only the variable costs for the tourist industry, but the capital that needs to grow steadily. For this reason, and on the assumption that tourism has established itself as one of the major global economic activities, it raises the need for an effective education that may be based on an educational framework that use the most innovative pedagogical and business trends.
At this stage, the Faculty of Tourism at the University of Colima (Mexico) arises as a short-term challenge, to form high-quality skilled human capital that may assume an innovation and competitiveness commitment in an international environment.
These skills and abilities should include a high content of industry’s sustainable management, information and communication technologies, skills to communicate in different languages, skills to develop research for innovation, as well as prior work experience gained through a professional internship program, among others.
Based on the above, this work aims to find the challenges and opportunities of tourism’s education through an analysis of the perception that students of the Tourism Management Bachelor degree have about their future career opportunities and their expectations to be incorporated into the national and international labor markets. It also analyzes the employers’ expectations, the currently educators profile but also the profile they should have to contribute to form high-quality skilled human capital.

Keywords:

Human capital, Tourism education, high-quality skills, labor markets.