By Benjamin Mwibo: The Institute of Tourism at Kabaale University is introducing a new set of skills within the course to match modern times. These new set of skills will lead to an all-sense experience for tourists; this making sure a tourist gets a full package of smell, taste, feel and even get to hear as they go around.
Dr. Christine Ampumuza, the Head of the Institute says that tourism has grown to a level where it is beyond merely seeing things but getting an attachment of one’s whole being to them.
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To provide this new set of skills, Dr. Ampumuza said that students at the campus offering Bachelor of Tourism and Hospitality Management will be spending more time in the field after their first year.
After the first year, the students are able to specialize in their fields of interests and then go practical in tourism sites.
The skills to be taught entail both the hard and soft skills. Dr.Ampumuza mentioned that soft skills are mostly lacking among Uganda’s tourism professionals.
“We have come up with a formula that is 50/50, though some people think theory is not important, we demystify this because theory informs practice and this is another area we are focusing on.”
In addition, much emphasis will be put on Geographical information Systems-GIS to strengthen mapping. This will help the students to get international visibility of their sites and link up with the market, rather than waiting for an expert to do it for them.
Meanwhile, Dr. Ampumuza also pointed to the need to address the job search challenge within this course. She says that students will instead be taught to creatively develop homestead tourism ventures, in order to make them adopt to their industry needs locally.
The entire goal of this is to see that tourists are fed with passion from their tours other than detached models and features.
By D Kasule