Management Shadowing Program: An Incubator for Prospective Managers in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry

The hospitality industry needs qualified work-ready graduates with skills but unfortunately tourism students are changing their career paths outside tourism and/or cannot obtain a managerial perspective. The Management Shadowing Program joins up the dots between academia, graduates and practitioners with real-life experiences from the management perspective, which opens a new window of opportunity for tourism graduates in a preference towards a career in tourism. This program enables theoretical in-class learning and summer internship practical experience at a managerial level, leading to the utilization of data within practical contexts. The holistic multiple explanatory case study method utilized in this study reveals how industry-academia cooperation can effectively produce prospective managers of hospitality. Semi-structured interviews, focus group, weekly report content analysis, participant observations and questionnaires were used for the triangulation of data collection and analysis. The aim of this study is to propose a model for a Management Shadowing Program that can be used as an incubator for prospective graduates with the clear target of developing their managerial skills via experiential learning and creating a talent pool for the industry, as well as assurance of curriculum for academia and to evaluate the outcomes of the program from the perspectives of both alumni and the sector.