Youth explore options at Tourism Career showcase

Youth interested in knowing more about the tourism industry, as well as those seeking out various career options in the sector, had the opportunity to meet with industry
experts who could ably assist them during the recently held Tourism Career Showcase.

Held at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre by the Barbados Tourism Product Authority (BTPA) as part of the activities for Tourism and Maritime Week 2017, the Tourism Career Showcase was well attended, as students from secondary and tertiary level institutions and youth in general explored the various booths set up, to highlight such areas as culinary tourism, agro-tourism, adventure and leisure tourism, cultural heritage tourism, community tourism and business tourism, to name a few.

BTPA Guest Experience Manager, Marsha Alleyne, told The Barbados Advocate that the showcase was designed to be a unique one, where persons would witness firsthand what the tourism industry offers.

“This showcase really and truly is an initiative that came out of the BTPA. One of our admin assistants, Chanique Morris, came up with the idea of doing a showcase, but not just a regular showcase where it is a talk shop, but an actual physical, very interactive showcase where people can actually touch, taste, feel, and understand from a completely different (view) what the tourism industry actually brings,” Alleyne stated.

“We have been saying over and over again that tourism is a very inclusive industry, and I think in this showcase we are demonstrating the inclusivity of it .You will see education, you will see the agricultural sector, you will see the entertainment, the culinary sector. Of course the hotels and attractions are also here as well, but tourism is a very diverse and very dynamic industry and we really and truly wanted to showcase it from a completely different perspective, and that’s what you are seeing,” she added.

Admin Assistant with the National Tourism Host Programme, Chanique Morris, meanwhile noted that her vision was to create a direct linkage between the present generation and the tourism industry.

“Tourism is our industry and I wanted really to get the school children aware, to get them educated about what the Barbados tourism industry has to offer and what careers are available to them. So in my mind, I wanted to create a centre for networking so that they can speak to the experts in the industry, to get the path on which to go down, to get to that particular career in which they are actually interested,” she commented.

She further added that there were various human resource managers on hand to point youth in the right direction about various jobs available at present within the tourism industry.