Have you been following our site recently? I’m sure you have come across the project called HyPro4ST – but maybe you are not familiar with the intent of the project.
Project HyPro4ST is a collaboration of project partners from several countries to create a new job position in the field of sustainable tourism and to develop the necessary training material for that.
What is the purpose of the HyPro4ST project?
In 2023, it is clear to most of us that providing services in the field of tourism is unimaginable without considering sustainability factors. This recognition has to be a key aspect in terms of travel, products manufactured for tourism, and services offered. The sector is facing new challenges we didn’t know earlier, and as always, new challenges need new solutions. In our case, the solution we are working on is to train new, adequately prepared professionals to deal with the newly emerging problems and tasks of the tourism sector.
We also noticed that university education is following the changes in social and environmental demands relatively slowly. Even if it would keep up, it would still take several years to train a new generation of tourism professionals.
That is why we teamed up with our partners from Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, Portugal, and Hungary to develop a curriculum to help train professionals suitable for the position of Sustainable and Hybrid Project Manager.
Areas covered by the curriculum
As an education and training company, our role in the project is mainly taking part in developing the curriculum. We specified three basic areas of knowledge:
- Competences related to sustainability: introducing students to good practices and principles that can show them the possibilities of sustainable production and service providing in the field of tourism. This includes, among others, energy and water management, water retention, waste management, reuse and recycling.
- Entrepreneurship and communication competencies: social skills, problem-solving, creativity and cooperation skills, and knowledge about social equality. We believe that these provide essential knowledge about the tourism of the future.
- Digital competencies: The labor market and data processing are constantly changing and being more and more digitalized. Sustainable and hybrid project managers of the future need to develop high-level skills in this area as well.
While working on the curriculum, we did not specialize in certain sectors of tourism. We wanted to put the principles of project management and sustainable tourism into practice, regardless of which area of tourism it affected. We applied the methodology of Design Thinking, and in terms of sustainability, we relied on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
We developed the competencies required for the planned job, and based on these, we defined the six modules of the course:
- Sustainability in the tourism sector
- Digital competencies in sustainable tourism
- Sustainable and hybrid project management in sustainable tourism
- Resilience in sustainable and hybrid project management
- Creativity and entrepreneurial skills in sustainable tourism
- Applying project approach in tourism businesses
The next step of the project is to work out the content of the modules and the development of the appropriate learning methodology. For each module, we start with defining the knowledge covered by the module, the skills and abilities to develop, and the expected result. The goal is to train sustainable tourism professionals who have useful and practical knowledge of sustainability, digital skills, creativity, and entrepreneurship in tourism.
In addition, we also would like to expand the knowledge of professionals who are currently participating in training and enrich it with the latest knowledge.
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