Tourism Education of the Future (TEF) is an Erasmus + KA220 project belonging to Round 1 of the program, aiming at developing the cooperation among VET organisations and institutions. Project activities covered the period between September 2022 and August 2024; our evaluation report mainly deals with the achievements acquired during the final phase of the project, considering however cooperation and production processes developed along the whole duration of the project.
The general aim of TEF was to deal with the huge transformations characterising the hospitality sector, coping the growing skills mismatch in order to reduce the gap between competences and skills focused on by school learning paths and needs of the tourism industry. The project was focusing on the pervasive role played by the digitisation at different levels: promotion, management and implementation, commercialisation of touristic offers, diffusion of generative Artificial Intelligence as emerging transversal factor.
The project was expected to reach three specific objectives (results), defined in a broad way in the application and clearly connected with the focus:
1. Improve digital competences of teachers and students;
2. Improve soft skills of students;
3. Improve professional competences of students and professionals.
The project expected impact was to foster, thanks to the above mentioned results (outcomes), a better quality of VET provision, leading to:
• an increased employability of students and professionals,
• and to an improved quality of the tourism offer in the partners’ tourism ecosystems.
TEF project will involve the Tourism Thematic Team Community of practice in using the results and keeping it alive. It will share the catalogue of CVET course with the association of tourism professionals and VET providers. It will present the online Masterclasses as a way to bring external expertise and companies’ staff participation to the schools, giving the students/teachers the possibility to exploit in the future materials and maybe courses. It will encourage local network of stakeholders to perform the skills gap analysis using the TEF toolkit, organising a workshop during the EfVET events or conference in area dedication to the innovation of tourism provision. The toolkit to analyse 22 skills gap emerging in the Tourism sector could be of extreme relevance for the EfVET projects and other activities. EfVET as well will promote the benefits of the project through conferences, publications, and social media.
