Authors: Anna Laizāne and Laura Ait Ožmida, WeSkill project partner from Latvia – Riga Style and Fashion Technical School

Wellness and Spa Tourism. The necessity of highly qualified, skilful, knowledgeable workforce in the market becomes more topical each day, especially in SPA, wellness sector. The era of the digital economy dictates its own rules, and high quality, complicated digital knowledge, skills, as well as soft skills will be increasingly in demand. 

The necessity of highly qualified, skilful and knowledgeable workforce in the market becomes more topical each day, especially in SPA and wellness sector. Latvia offers health tourism that is rapidly growing. Riga Style and Fashion Technical School in Latvia is the educational establishment where students obtain qualification SPA specialist.

We are delighted to share our experience of taking part in the project “Wellness and Spa Tourism Sectoral Skills’ Development” (WeSkill) (Nr 621401-EPP-1-2020-1-BG-EPPKA2-SSA) with the main objective to design transnational curricula, e-learning training content, tools in wellness and spa tourism sector for VET students, employees thus emphasizing the needed skills, competences of adults/employees, modern training, didactic tools in order to make wellness and spa tourism sector more appealing, sustainable, advanced, competitive in the EU area.

There are stated specific goals of the WeSkill project:

• updating of skills, new skills for new fully relevant to the labour market in the sector jobs;
• mobile EU workforce, mobility;
• matching between skills and labour market needs, bridging the gap between education and work, improving synergy between the worlds of education and work;
• equipping young people for the job market, fostering studying abroad in EU;
• equipping adults/employees from the sector being trainees with the missing skills, by using a strong modern personalized didactic tool;
• enhance job expectations of trainees through up-skilling of the young and adults;
• with mobile app development and the promotion of the app usage, we will try to make wellness and spa tourism sector more appealing, sustainable, advanced and competitive in the EU area.

WeSkill project’s partners represent various European organizations from Bulgaria, Slovenia, Latvia, Greece, Serbia, Italy, France, the Netherlands.

The project research report disclosed Wellness and Spa sector skills’ gaps in seven project participating countries, including four countries beyond the partnership. The most important shortages identified were in four groups of skills:

• Computer skills /digital skills /ICT skills,
• Communication skills /written and spoken communication / telephone reception techniques /intercultural communication skills /multicultural communication skills,
• Foreign languages skills for the medical and spa personnel/ multilingual skills/ foreign language using professional terminology/
• Customer service/ customer-oriented service/ approach.

As we can see, the era of the digital economy dictates its own rules, and high quality and complicated digital knowledge and skills will be increasingly in demand. In the Spa and wellness sector on the most important skills is the skill of communication. In this regard, one can draw parallels with the connection of various skills including digital communication skills, verbal communication and presentation skills. Multicultural communication skills are inevitably becoming more relevant, especially in light of the growth in the flow of foreign tourists into the European Union from Asian countries, Arab states with their religious and cultural characteristics.

Foreign language skills are vital and especially so in the Spa and wellness sector. Improved foreign language skills are required in the use of Spa and wellness terminology, medical terms, as well as overall improvement of foreign language skills including English and other languages, including the languages of Asian countries with a view to the future. In the Wellness and Spa sector, customer-oriented service is extremely important.

Proceeding the implementation of the project the curricula for skills development in the wellness and spa sector designed for EQF level 4 related qualifications and learning materials supporting the curricula were created.

There are handbook, theoretical exercises, presentations for classes, testing materials for 5 modules: “Digital Skills”; “Digital marketing”; “Client Oriented Communication, Service Skills and Problem Solving Skills”; “Design of Spa and Wellness products”; “Sustainable development in SPA and Wellness”. Each curriculum also defines work-based learning standards based on the European Commission publication “Work-based learning in Europe: practice and policy guidance”, and taking into account the six key elements identified in the EQAVET Secretariat’s Quality and Qualifications “Quality Assurance for Work-Based Learning” publication.

For to facilitate the employee upskilling in sector and to support the vocational institutions the E-learning platform and multilingual training mobile application is being developed. It will work as learning and testing tool to be used by the trainees.

The E-learning platform will offer personalised accounts to store and manage documents and results from the mobile app. Platform functionality will allow teachers and trainers to review and evaluate the results achieved by trainees from tests and exercises accomplished in the mobile app. The platform will compromise full set of additional training materials and information (digital lessons, video, audio files, text documents). It will be also important instrument for functioning the European Wellness and Spa Network for VET Excellence (EWSNET).

The WeSkill project is in its final phase – piloting of the e-learning platform by VET students and employees. The public opening of E-learning platform and presentation of the project’s outcomes were presented at the conference in Sophia, Bulgaria, 23rd April 2024.

The opportunity of free access to E-learning platform created by Weskill project is already highly valued by technical school’s community due to the fact that e-learning platform will be used in the learning process as a source of gaining knowledge and obtaining digital, client-oriented communication, service skills and problem-solving skills. Those skills are so crucial for VET students and employees in the SPA and wellness sector.

More information or WeSkill project and E-learning platform visit website – https://weskill.eu/