Queensland Tourism Industry Council (QTIC) builds skills capacity across their state.

Queensland Tourism Industry Council (QTIC) is the peak industry body for tourism in Queensland, Australia. The Queensland Tourism Industry Council acts as “The Voice of Tourism” and represents the interests of Queensland’s tourism and hospitality industry.

Tourism in Queensland is a $27.3 billion industry that sustains 237,000 jobs across 55,000 businesses in the region.

Queensland’s competitive position in the tourism and hospitality market depends on creating skilled people to work in the industry. The micro-credentialling program is part of a long-term skills development program and strategy.

Challenge

One of the greatest challenges facing the tourism and hospitality industry in Queensland is labour shortages and skill deficiencies. QTIC has seen the demand for hospitality and tourism workers, including Front of House, Back of House and Front office teams continue to increase. To enable the industry to prosper, QTIC wanted to support the businesses in their state to attract, recruit, train and retain people across the state into hospitality and tourism roles.

QTIC was looking for a way to train new entrants to the industry, assist experienced hospitality professionals to upskill, and cross skill workers via micro-credentials. They wanted people to be able to upskill quickly, learn on-the-job and improve customer experiences. They needed to develop a program that was accessible, scalable and engaging to address the need for improving skills across the industry.

Solution

To help the economy recover, and to put long-term learning and development strategies in place, QTIC has partnered with Typsy to support skills development across Queensland. QTIC has seen immense success with the program and will be expanding the offering over the coming years, to allow more people to be trained in necessary hospitality and tourism skills. Every new employee is given a Typsy account, a learning profile and custom learning pathways have been created.

Tourism and hospitality are highly dependent on human resources and staff skills to deliver quality experiences for visitors. Micro-credentials available on Typsy provide a practical, accessible and effective tool to train and upskill both new and existing staff.

QTIC have used some of the standard courses on Typsy as training to develop hospitality skills, and they have also developed their own micro-credential courses to support specific industry and regional needs. Typsy’s content team worked with QTIC to develop specific courses and supported them with instructional design, pre-production and post production. The QTIC courses are hosted on the Typsy training platform.

QTIC has found Typsy has helped them reach people in remote areas who otherwise struggle to gain access to high quality training. It has given businesses an opportunity to attract new people and train them quickly to help with the skills gap and skills shortages.

An employee can complete courses and lessons assigned by the employer, and can choose to watch any other Typsy course on-demand for their own self-development. Over 1,100 lessons exist on the platform across seven categories including: compliance; service; management; hotel; business; culinary; and beverage.

Results

QTIC launched the program with Typsy in May 2020, and to date have successfully delivered over 1,400 courses and 14,000 lessons to over 1,300 tourism, travel, events, and hospitality staff, involving over 460 tourism and hospitality businesses.

Employers have used the program to onboard new employees and upskill current employees. They also have access to online reports through the Typsy platform, allowing them to see employee involvement, progress on employer-assigned courses or lessons, as well as courses and lessons chosen by the employee themselves.

Employers have also been able to easily identify an employee’s interest area and help to develop individual employee career paths.

QTIC are further expanding the offering over the coming years so more businesses and new entrants to the hospitality and tourism industry have access to learn online hospitality skills and gain micro-credentials with Typsy.