With the academic year coming to a close in Goa, the state's hospitality industry stakeholders are rooting for upgrading of skills in youngsters and the unemployed youth, especially keen on working in the hospitality and tourism verticals, which contributes to nearly 50 percent of the state's economy.
Appropriate skilling has traditionally served as a big gulf between education and employment in the state, which largely depends on a migrant workforce for both blue collar and white collar employment, especially in the hospitality, tourism and other service industry verticals.
According to Prahlad Sukhtankar, the Goa Chapter Head of the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI), currently the curriculum offered by most colleges appears to be outdated, with a focus on meeting the demands of international cruise liners or providing line staff for renowned international five-star brands.
"It seems that students are not exposed to cutting-edge skills in the culinary craft; instead, they are taught the basics necessary to secure an entry-level job within major corporations. One potential consequence of this approach is that Goan youth may struggle to advance to top management positions in the cruise industry, which could lead to a loss of interest and their eventual return to India," Sukhtankar said.
Sukhtankar appears to have put the finger on the pulse of the skilling issue, one which Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant has underlined time and again in his public engagements in recent times.
Sawant in his budget speech for the financial year 2023-24, raised his budgetary allocation for skill development and entrepreneurship by nearly 30 per cent, in a bid to make the youth more "employable"; a matter of concern in a state where the unemployment rate has touched nearly 13 percent, nearly double the national average.
“You must have read that the unemployment rate in Goa is 13 per cent. Who is responsible for it? Is it only the government that is responsible? If you see the unemployed, more than 70 per cent are graduates. And not just BA, BCom, BSc, engineering students (are in it) too... At present, the requirement is skill education,” Sawant said.
Siddharth Savkur, CEO of Kamaxi Group, one of the state's largest recruiting and skilling firms, the traditional hospitality courses being taught in the state have outdated curricula that were set, sometimes, decades ago.
"The concepts and techniques taught to aspiring hoteliers are often out of sync with what hotels follow. For example, culinary training in colleges is dominated by classical cooking whereas today's diners seek modern culinary experiences. Therefore, students enter the industry with little or no knowledge of ground reality," Savkur said.
According Dr. Purvendu Sharma, assistant professor, (Marketing) at Goa Institute of Management, the state's top Bschool, Goa’s education curriculum needs to keep pace with the process of digitisation in businesses, especially while grooming young managers in the hospitality industry.
"In light of digitisation, potential managers need to examine the latest machine learning and big data analysis tools that would help them gain rich data-enabled insights. This would help provide for more efficient work processes. Also, destination marketing goes hand-in-hand with the hospitality industry. Hence, potential managers should learn how to leverage destination branding facets on social media and rely more on experiential learning methods and on-field experiences for better learning," Sharma said.
Meanwhile, even as the Goa government and tourism and hospitality industry stakeholders debate over bridging the gap between education and employability, there are several youngsters like 25-year-old Sasha Elmy Cruz, who on her own volition chose to skill herself with a six months 'Commis Chef - Bakery and Pastry programme' at the Kamaxi College of Culinary Arts to achieve her ambition of opening a French-styled bakery-cum-cafe in Goa.
"I was inspired to bake thanks to my mother's caramel pudding. I took up the skilling course to help me to get to work in a bakery in France in order to learn French pastries. Later, I want to open my own cafe in Goa," she says.