The Mataró TecnoCampus technology park has held the Tourism Talent Forum, an annual meeting in which several companies in the tourism sector come to the classrooms to present the latest developments in the sector. “The forum is also an opportunity to put companies in the field of tourism, seeking to incorporate new talent, in contact with undergraduate students who can help them innovate,” explains Alex Araujo, coordinator of the Double Degree in Tourism and ADE.
This year’s edition, which has been held in person after the end of the pandemic, has dealt with the recovery of the tourism sector in a post-Covid scenario. For this, four representatives from different companies have collaborated: Beatriz Camps from Hotusa, Domingo Valero from Enterprise, Alba Roca from Turijobs and Joan Santmarti from Exum.
All of them have agreed in their presentations that the pandemic has caused an acceleration in the digitization of various areas of the tourism sector -hospitality, accommodation and travel- due to the impossibility of having staff due to the sanitary restrictions applied by the government.
During the Tourism Talent Forum, the new profile that the tourism sector needs was also discussed. The four participants have agreed that people who want to work in this area will need to have a high level of knowledge of the tourism sphere and a great command of new technologies.
One of the examples provided by specialists to explain the rise of this job profile has been the creation, by the Generalitat in collaboration with 24 companies in the tourism sphere, of the ICT Turisme cluster. A public-private partnership that seeks to improve the competitiveness of companies in the area by attracting talent and accelerating the incorporation of new technologies.
Another of the outstanding profiles is the one that combines knowledge of the tourism sector and business management since, as Araujo points out, “tourism, being an area that has implications for the economy and the territory, requires transversal knowledge, a training that provides the double Degree in Tourism and Business Administration”.
The Tourism Talent Forum has highlighted the need to modernize the tourism sector to generate more value added to a very important economic area both in Catalonia and in Spain. “We must dismantle the myths of tourism as a sector with little added value and begin to understand it from its transversality,” says the TecnoCampus professor.
Likewise, the coordinator of the double Degree in Tourism has pointed out that the tourism sector is a sector in constant change and that in the same way that it is affected by external factors -the covid-19 pandemic or the war in Ukraine- it is also affected for the “social and economic reality of the territories”.
“People will continue to travel and will continue to dream of special places and unforgettable experiences, so it is in our hands that tourism be positive and respectful for all the agents involved in it,” concludes Alex Araujo, coordinator of the Double Degree in Tourism and ADE of TecnoCampus.
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