THE hospitality industry is renowned for its long and often antisocial hours giving workers who are keen to gain qualifications and develop their careers precious little time for traditional study.
Now the Swiss Glion Institute of Higher Education, which is recognised as one of the industry’s top teaching establishments, is addressing the issue with an online MBA course.
Launched last year the programme has been designed specifically to meet the unique needs of working professionals in the hospitality, tourism and wider service industries.
The online MBA promotes the advanced study of organisations, their management and the ever-changing context in which the hospitality industry now operates, thus enabling students to further their careers within the industry or to go on into new fields.
Spokeswoman Fabienne Rollandin said: “For a number of years we have wanted to do an online masters for the hospitality industry because there is a lot of need for it – people in hotels and catering work very long hours and for them it’s hard to take a full year off. We did our research and there was a lot of interest.”
This is the only course online that offers a masters in hospitality management – there are others that do similar but Glion is a specialist for the hospitality industry.
To join students must have either a bachelors, preferably in hospitality or business, or significant work experience at managerial level – Glion requires around five years.
However, at the moment the average age of take up is 39 with 17 years experience!
Approximately 30 per cent of the students are general managers from the hotel industry and others are mainly in management or hoping to be.
Rollandin said: “This kind of study can be a personal challenge, people may have been climbing the management ladder and are now finding younger colleagues coming up who have the qualifications they did not have time to get.“
And she added that despite frequent fears that studying online will be lonely, the course offers interactive meetings, online cafés and a whole host of other helpful initiatives to make study both interesting and productive.