Semantics of learning outcomes for a tourism degree across institutions, industry and governing bodies

Abstract

Tourism is a major Australian business sector contributing significantly to the nation's GDP and employing many Australians in hundreds of thousands of businesses, but also currently and in the future expected to face significant skills shortages. Amongst the responses is the Office of Learning and Teaching's recent development of agreed tourism, hospitality and events academic standards in the form of threshold learning outcomes. But do current Australian tourism degree course objectives and graduate attributes align with the new standards? And do the semantics, or naming conventions, for particular graduate attributes cause confusion across the various stakeholders such as industry recruiters and even students and their families. This paper considers this question with regard to the tourism and events management degree offered in a middle sized Australian university tourism program.