State hotel school to tap professionals to enter industry
The Sri Lanka Institute of Tourism and Hotel Management (SLITHM) has established a special unit to ensure professionals could take up the opportunities within the industry through adequate awareness and training.
The institute has planned to conduct a series of tourism related events, trainings and workshops for the benefit of tourism stakeholders through the newly formed Tourism Event Management Unit.
This new unit will conduct workshops for those in the industry, academic and regulatory bodies and identify and develop training programmes for youth through short and long term programmes and issuing a certificate.
These courses have been designed to help bridge the gap between the industry and professionals in the various sectors of the tourism industry like the Ayurveda tourism, Adventure tourism, spiritual and religious tourism, wildlife, recreational, archeology and research findings for tourism, community based tourism, eco and sustainable tourism, and cultural tourism. The first workshop would commence on Health and Wellness tourism from September 6.
University of Colombo, Head of the Department of Basic Principles of Ayurveda Dr. Susantha Molligoda explained that with about 200 physicians passing out annually they have found that some of these professionals do not get work in the private sector as a result the gap between the availability of professionals and the opportunities in the tourism industry needs to be filled.
In line with the industry developments, the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority (SLTDA) Standards and Quality Assurance Director Chandana Wijeratne said that they would in future ensure that 21 specified tourist services would have to be registered to gain approval to operate in the industry.
In this respect, by end September eight services would be gazette including Ayurveda service providers that would have to be licensed and registered with the Department of Ayurveda from the Ministry of Health.
SLITHM Head Sunil Dissanayake explained that the new unit was imperative more so since there were certain industry requirements that need to be met with, like staff be appropriately trained and in possession of a certificate; ensure personal hygiene and grooming; and speak at least one foreign language.
In addition to the above in future the unit would also look at conducting destination marketing programmes and travel related programmes to train staff on how to sell and capture inbound travelers and structure and customise tour packages.