Dr. Hilde Hanegreefs (Senior Lecturer and Researcher at Zuyd University) recently had the pleasure to participate in a sounding board meeting with the hospitality industry to brainstorm about the future curriculum at the hotel management school. Three overarching themes emerged: sustainability, technology and soft skills. Hilde was pleasantly surprised to hear how much importance the work field attaches to soft skills, the so-called transferable skills, such as communication skills, global competence, analytical and critical thinking, people and data management, etc. Even within the topic of sustainability, attention was paid undividedly to social sustainability: how can we attract and retain the right employees in times of scarcity on the labor market? How do we become a workplace where people want to work? And within the topic technology too, the emphasis was not just on mastering all technological tools, but primarily on reading and interpreting data, i.e. our added value as humans to all automated processes.
Hilde is happy to be part of two research centers (Global Minds @ Work & Professional Communication in a Digitalizing Society) that actively focus on developing the intercultural, communication and digital skills of our students, with the common goal of sharpening their critical thinking skills. Together with all the enthusiastic teachers at the HMSM and the professional field, we will make the hotello of the future future-proof.
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Interested in what soft skills are and how they are used in hospitality? Click on the links down below for an interesting read:
