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UNTWO (The United Nations World Tourism Organization) mentions that globally, in value terms, the Tourism Direct GDP (TDGDP) fell from USD 3.5 trillion in 2019 to USD 1.7 trillion in 2020 and recovered to about USD 2.2 trillion in 2021, following a moderate increase in travel, mostly due to domestic tourism in 2022.
The UNWTO Panel of Experts survey indicates that almost 70% of experts expected better performance in May-August 2023. Yet, most continue to believe international tourism will not return to 2019 levels until 2024 or later.
Latest studies show that tourism recovered 87% of pre-pandemic levels in January-September 2023. That puts the sector on course to recover almost 90% by the end of the year. International tourism receipts could reach USD 1.4 trillion in 2023, about 93% of the USD 1.5 trillion earned by destinations in the past years.
The industry is focused to ensure a sustainable growth of the sector and build resilience to future challenges by using digital leverage to improve the consumer experience in the years to come.
International tourism is expected to grow in the coming years. This brings both opportunities and challenges. The opportunity is to invest in tourism and create quality jobs. The challenge is that in order to sustain the expected growth and ensure the competitiveness and sustainability of the tourism industry, UNWTO member countries need an appropriate tourism human capital base to meet the current and future demands of the tourism industry.
Therefore, tourism development in UNWTO Member States needs a human capital base that is:
• Abundant: The right volume of human capital available at all skill levels and in all sub-sectors and job families of tourism.
• Highly qualified: Human capital with the right type and level of education, training and experience available at all skill levels and in all sub-sectors and job families of tourism.
• Highly motivated and with the right attitude: : In order to deliver exceptional experiences to visitors.
• Able to gain the economic benefits from tourism: It is also imperative that UNWTO Member States and their local communities can fully benefit from the growth of the tourism sector through meaningful, quality jobs with clear and visible career path opportunities in the sector.
When planning tourism human capital development, it is also important to note that the human capital needs of the tourism sector today will not be the same as in 2030. The industry will see the emergence of new types of travel businesses, products, services and professions that will require different skills, knowledge and personality traits.
As the industry adapts to newer technologies, the need for new skillsets will emerge too. The current technological trends focus on AI/ML in the Travel and Hospitality domain to enable mass personalization and creating a customer centric experience. Hence optimized human resources management and development of professional skills relevant to the domain is currently a focus area.
Meet Veronica, an employee of a leading Travel and Tourism organization. She is responsible for managing bookings and reservations, customer complaints and at times she is also required to create custom tourist packages based on customer requirements. Here are a few challenges faced by her when it comes to learning and upskilling herself.
1. Time Management: Veronica has a busy work schedule, including interacting with customers, handling paperwork, and assisting with tour plans, bookings, and itineraries. Finding time for certification courses and continuous learning can be challenging.
2. Balancing Responsibilities: Veronica's daily tasks often leave her with limited flexibility to attend training sessions or workshops. She needs to find a balance between her immediate responsibilities and the need for ongoing learning.
3. Keeping Up with Regulations: The Tourism industry is subject to complex and ever-changing regulations related to health and safety standards and tourist protection. Veronica must stay informed about these regulations to ensure compliance, which requires regular updates and training.
4. Customer Expectations: Customers expect employees like Veronica to be knowledgeable about the tourist destinations, their history and significance, safety advancements, and environmental considerations. Meeting these expectations necessitates continuous learning.
5. Product Knowledge: Veronica needs to have a deep understanding of the different packages, alternatives that can be considered to make it an enriching customer experience, pricing, etc. Staying updated on these details can be challenging, especially when new and seasonal offers are introduced.
6. Customer Delight: The art of wooing customers needs to constantly evolve with every new customer. One size may not necessarily fit all. Veronica must adapt to customer engagement strategies and make necessary changes to remain effective in her role.
7. Job Security: Veronica may feel the pressure to stay competitive in her position and job market. Continuous learning is not only about serving customers but also ensuring her own job security and career growth.
8. Training Availability: Depending on the organization's resources, access to training programs and materials may be limited. Veronica might need to look for various training offerings or seek external courses to enhance her knowledge and skills.
Let us look at how TCS iON Learning Solutions can be considered a good fit to help both Veronica and her organization to transform their learning ecosystem and experience through technology and innovative methodologies.
How can we help Veronica (The Learner)?
The platform is focused on enabling the 6As of Learning – Anyone to learn, Anytime, Anywhere, using Any content delivered on Any device and Analytics to enable an end-to-end learning experience for the learners. The following factors make TCS iON Learning platform an apt solution to address every learner’s requirement.
Figure 1: Enabling 6A’s of Learning
Flexible: The ability to learn anytime, anywhere and on any device makes it convenient for learners to keep up with mandatory, functional, role-based or aspirational learning. The platform enables a 'Phygital' mode of learning, combining classroom and online learning in one solution. The platform is also designed to be mobile-responsive, allowing learning to be accessed on any mobile device such as tablets and smartphones. Different learning content and assessment formats, accessible on both computers and mobile devices, will help learners like Veronica to continue learning at their convenience.
Personalized:TCS iON learning platforms are designed to meet the learning needs of a diverse learner population. Every learning style and preference is addressed through a single platform to ensure a personalized learning experience for learners. The platform also leverages AI/ML to study learner behavior and learning trends on the platform to provide relevant and personalized learning recommendations to learners.
Immersive: The platform also enables an immersive, engaging, and interactive learning experience by leveraging TCS iON's patented GAMELab offering. This offering helps learners learn while they play and engage with game-based and gamified learning content that can be authored and deployed very quickly through simple and ready-to-use game cartridges, AR/VR, 3D animations in a few clicks and minutes.
Data Driven: The ability to track their learning health through interactive dashboards that monitor courses, competencies, aspirational role-based learning, community interactions, etc., will help Veronica and her colleagues to regularly review their learning performance and take charge of their own skills development.
The platform's ability to host learning content in different formats, languages, and modes (online and offline) will make it easier for Veronica and her colleagues to stay engaged and continue learning. They will be able to keep up to date, comply with mandatory learning requirements, upskill/reskill based on their existing and aspired roles, and stay engaged while learning with the TCS iON Digital Learning platform.
Here are some key differentiators that explain how TCS iON Digital Learning can help organizations create an enriched learning experience and build a personalized and engaging learning ecosystem.
Figure 2: Effective Learning powered by TCS iON
Phygital Learning: The latest learning trends recommend a blend of self-paced, and facilitator led learning for an effective learning experience. TCS iON solutions support Multi-Modal Content delivery and facilitates a ‘Phygital’ mode of learning on a single learning platform. The TCS iON learning platforms can go live speedily by loading digital content and existing SCORM compliant learning content as well as ppt, pdf, word, eBooks, videos, html files, etc. It enables high scalability to support adding of new content as and when required. Additional engaging content such as animations, simulations, and interactive media can be incorporated. To further increase interactivity, the platform can provide live conferencing and webinar features for Veronica, her colleagues, and faculties to engage.
One-stop-Shop for a variety of Learning Content: To address the industry specific learning needs, content may need to be sourced from different platforms – industry knowledge platforms, intranets of institutions, LMS of organizations, etc. TCS iON iDL follows an Open Architecture. It enables APIs for reading/writing of data, and SSO support for SAML2, which means that it can easily integrate with multiple platforms, thereby allowing users to log into one platform to access all the relevant content needed for skilling needs. The solution can even launch other LMS and create packaged courses combining the best of both platforms. This will help in creating a hassle-free experience for Veronica and her colleagues as well as the administrators.
Competency driven learning: In a sector facing rapid skill drain, it is important to identify critical competencies and prioritize the acquisition of those competencies. The competency framework of iDL allows competency-based learning. It will also help Veronica to identify aspirational roles and competencies associated with those roles. So, both from the organization’s point of view as well as Veronica’s, the competency framework helps in focused learning.
Assessments and Assignments: For critical learning, robust assessment solutions are required. There can be no room for error in determining whether learners like Veronica have acquired the skills required for them to do their job. The different modes of assessment available on iDL helps to create different types of assessments, testing learners at different levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. The assignment feature will enable her to submit detailed assignments which evaluators can examine and assign marks. It includes comprehensive features like User Feedback, Plagiarism Check, Video Conferencing, Custom Grading, etc.
Analytics & Insights: It is important to have good data input to ensure that the right skills are there with the organization at any point of time. The Report & Communication module of iDL enables on demand reports so that organizations can get the slices and dices of data they need to take decisions related to workforce skilling and management whereas Veronica and her colleagues stay up to date and well informed on their learning health.
Learning Services: Learning Services enable increased interlinking between Learning strategy and Business models for a sustainable ecosystem and a resilient workforce. It helps weave technology, content, and innovative learning methodologies together to create an impactful learning experience and outcome by following a learner centric approach. These services are crafted specifically to help organizations benefit through improved employee engagement, improved learning adoption, reduced time to competence, reduction in infant attrition, career progression paths, etc.
Learning effectiveness measurement: For any type of learning, assessing the actual impact is important. However, in a sector that affects life and death, this becomes mission critical. However, learning managers have always found it difficult to identify the real impact of learning. iDL has been created with Instructional design inputs and a learning effectiveness measurement framework based on the industry best Kirkpatrick Model. This framework along with the learning services offered as value added feature, can help pinpoint the actual impact of any training and help take any remedial measures necessary.
In a nutshell, TCS iON solutions offer a non-threatening, simple, and technology-driven learning and development solution and frameworks that is supported with structured and unstructured ways of learning and robust analytics and insights that is instrumental in helping individuals and organizations from the Travel, Tourism and Hospitality industry to continuously upskill/reskill and bridge skill gaps and facilitate effective decision-making. It also enables collaboration between the learning and development function and business functions to achieve business goals and challenges through learning transformation.