WeeklySA_AdminNICHE: Entrepreneurial opportunities for business-minded interns also abound in the sector…
By Victor Mecoamere
If you are a fun-loving, adventurous and extroverted person, then the travel and tourism sector is for you, especially if you would really like to earn a living doing something you really passionate about.
Then a career in the travel and tourism sector might just beckoning. Careers abound in this field. The list is inexhaustible – from flight attendant, food and beverages manager in a hotel, event planning, sales manager, tourism agency manager, regional tourism manager, international retail travel consultant, airport airline operations manager, visitors’ information officer, tourism consultant, tour guide to a hotel concierge.
According to information from the Culture, Arts, Tourism, Hospitality and Sport Sector Education and Training Authority (CATHSSETA), self-driven young people wishing to enter the travel and tourism industry can even create their own jobs.
They can find many a niche in tourism, by either offering bicycle tours around iconic places, or facilitating a bird’s eye-view of interesting places on hot-water balloons.
Education, training and obtaining qualifications are ordinarily key to increasing one’s chances through learnerships, internships, apprenticeships, work integrated learning programme, skills programmes or bursaries.
A learnership is an option for anyone seeking to go the route of gaining skills through a workplace-based training programme comprising both structured practical workplace and structured theoretical training.
An internship is another viable option for university and university of technology students or graduates looking for an opportunity to extend their academic qualifications through structured workplace exposure and specialised training.
Historically, learners from technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges have struggled to find employment after they had completed their studies.
However, with the Department of Higher Education and Training’s renewed focus on the promotion of TVET colleges and the qualifications they offer, there is a drive to increase the number of artisans requiring workplace experience as part of their training. Hence Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs), including the CATHSETA, are expected to assist in placing learners with employers for this vital component of the newly-graduated youths’ further ad specialised training.
The work integrated learning programme is also expected to cater for unemployed graduates who may have completed their qualification but are not employed because they lack work experience.
It is almost similar to apprenticeship, except that it is prevalent in trade occupations, and its duration – combining theory and practice in a single learning process – can range anywhere from 18 months to three years, and results in a formal qualification. At the end, the apprentice sits for a trade test, and this leads to a professional certification.
On the other hand, a skills programme culminates in at least one credit on the National Qualification Framework (NQF), through the accumulation of credit-bearing skills programmes which may lead to, or contribute towards a full qualification. And these are appropriate for people who may be lacking critical skills or may not have obtained a full qualification. Skills programmes can be performed at several levels on the NQF and learners on skills programmes receive credits for each unit standard they may have completed.
SETAs like CATHSSETA offer bursaries to prospective learners through institutions of higher learning or related workplace academies. Learners applying for these bursaries need to be studying towards a qualification that is relevant to the different SETAs’ sub-sectors, and also forming part of the SETAs’ discretionary funding.
