Educational investment strategies for capacity building of Thailand’s tourism professions

Abstract

The purposes of this paper were to (1) analyze the manpower requirements of Thailand’s tourism industry and (2) propose the educational investment strategies for capacity building of Thailand’s tourism professions. According to the concept of the Manpower Requirement Approach (MRA), this paper found that the trend of professional employment, which applies the Box-Jenkins approach to forecast the trend of professional employment, will be upward. The highest average annual growth rate is higher education. However, the largest proportion of professional employees in Thailand’s tourism industry has lower secondary or lower, followed by upper secondary educational attainment, and the smallest proportion has vocational education. The overall competencies in accordance with ASEAN standards (i.e., core competencies, generic competencies, and function competencies), which applies the needs assessment of manpower quality, are not sufficient to meet the need of establishments. Specifically, English language proficiencies are lowest. The findings are valuable for sending out signals to operating sectors which are responsible for educational investment, which optimizes the capabilities of Thailand’s tourism professions, and are as follows A: Pre-service education and training: (1) encourage private sector engagement, (2) increase financing of vocational education, and (3) target public investment to improve quality. B. In-service training: (1) evolve common donor strategy, (2) encourage recipient government to lead aid coordination, and (3) benchmarking for resource sufficiency.