The Italian School of Hospitality celebrated the first graduations of the three-year course in Hospitality Innovation and e-Tourism, developed in partnership with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Fourteen are the recent graduates who have completed this international and professionalizing course, which began in 2021 and is entirely in English, preparing highly sought-after profiles in the hospitality industry both in Italy and abroad.

Since its inception, the course has been at the top of the rankings-according to the prestigious QS World University Ranking by subject, it is first in Italy and among the top 100 worldwide in the Hospitality and Leisure field. The degree combines management skills in the hospitality industry with knowledge more closely related to soft skills, new technologies and sustainability of tourism services. The curriculum of the first graduates has been enriched by numerous internship experiences, training specialists in tourism 4.0: from the use of social media as promotion and marketing tools to the creation of an eco-sustainable tourism offer; from event planning to the analysis of changes in museum audiences; from human resource management in the age of artificial intelligence to blockchain technology for the hospitality industry.

“This is a truly exciting milestone not only for the students who placed their trust in us three years ago, investing their time and energy, and allowing us to accompany them on this new educational path, but also for me as coordinator of the degree program,” says Claudio Lucchese, professor of computer science and coordinator of the course. “A path that was not easy, covering very different areas, and that allowed them to acquire new managerial, economic, computer, and relational skills, and to put them into practice in no less than three different company internships. Now that this milestone has finally been reached, I wish them an exciting professional future and a happy personal future,” he continued.

“These degrees represent the crowning achievement of a project in which the Italian School of Hospitality has placed great faith from the very beginning,” says Giulio Contini, director general of the Italian School of Hospitality. “It demonstrates how public-private collaboration, carried out with criteria of social sustainability and with the involvement of all key players in the educational design of a degree program, is not only possible but also desirable. All recent graduates are fully bilingual and master a third language at B1 level. They have also successfully completed as many as 3 corporate internships, which proved to be as formative as the curricular subjects, many of which were innovative and industry-focused.”

“These experiences have created beneficial synergies for the growth path of students and young professionals. The more than 50 companies, both Italian and international, with which agreements have been signed over the past 3 years, express great satisfaction with the collaboration with SIO and Ca’ Foscari for student internships and express a strong interest in offering new graduates career paths for growth in a sector, that of hospitality, which offers more and more career opportunities,” Contini continues.

The first graduates represent “a very important achievement in my opinion because it comes from far away. We started with the degree program three years ago when there were still lockdowns and Covid. But at the same time there were people who still believed in the tourism and hospitality industry. Like the human resource directors of companies who collaborated with us to write this curriculum, which therefore has both academic and business value.”

Last but not least, the importance of the “three internships in 3 years included in the course” should be mentioned. As shared by the director of the School, graduates “will go on to middle management positions, obviously with a strong potential for growth. The hospitality industry is not an industry where upon leaving the course with lofty titles you become a director, CEO. A minimum of work field experience after your studies you have to do even you have done three internships. So the internships allowed what? Alternative growth: either horizontal growth, so getting experience in different departments, different departments, or vertical growth, so you stay in the same department but doing each year a little bit higher, a little bit more managerial level than the previous year.”

And the responses from companies are positive. “The feedback from the companies,” Contini explains, ”is absolutely satisfactory: just a few days ago I was talking to a human resources director and he was telling me to keep sending students to him, because these young people have an edge both from the point of view of preparation and from the point of view of motivation, an aspect on which we insist so much because it is an area where you cannot just do your little task even done well but you must always have the ability to go further, to anticipate the desires of the client, of the guest, to be able to interact with a team that is increasingly intercultural. These are all aspects that we have been working on since the first year and fortunately they are yielding results that are exactly what we hoped for when we started working,” he stresses. And Contini adds that “these first graduates will be joined by others from the first course by September-October. Many are in fact finishing their internships abroad, in Dubai, in Istanbul, where the courses are longer, as requested by companies. We have 50 people enrolled in the course each year, with limited numbers, to ensure quality.”