In viaggio verso la professione turistica: competenze trasversali di successo tra domanda e offerta

Tourism managers’ employment and entrepreneurial activity are relevant topics nowadays. The university curricula in this field have become extensive and well-structured on different levels. They are mainly focusing on hard skills, while Soft Skills - like leadership, entrepreneurship, emotion management, public speaking, time management and so on – must also be learned, improved, enhanced. Starting from Boyatzis (1982) who valued competence as determining valid professional results and considered that individual performance should be measurable and comparable through numerical evaluation and according to what was stated by Kaneklin et al. (2006), the current research develops from a specific investigation methodology (Bustreo e Russo, 2015) and involves a group of graduating students in different higher education courses in the tourism area and a group of tourism professionals. The objectives are, on the one side, identifying students’ awareness of their own successful cross-competences (SSC) in advanced education; on the other side, singling out the cross skills a group of professionals operating in the field basically require when interviewing a candidate. The survey allows to comprehend better what are the overlapping areas and what areas are not, between professional demand and declared students’ competences. That is, what does education in the field offer and what does the market require to be competent and able tourism professionals today?