higher education
Hospitality Management in the Surge of Service Age www.lavasa.com
Sudhir Andrews Dean, Ecole Hoteliere Lavasa
Please tell us about the origins of the Ecole Hoteliere Lavasa institute in India? The Institute is promoted by Lavasa Corporation, a subsidiary of Hindustan Construction Company (HCC), a leading infrastructure company of the country. HCC procured 20,000 acres of land in the hills and hours drive from Pune to create a unique hill township – the first after independence. The development of Lavasa is reposed with Lavasa Corporation. One of the pillars of Lavasa is Education, bringing in the best brands of the world including Oxford and MIT. Ecole Hoteliere Lavasa is the first college in Lavasa with world class facilities. Our vision is to be the premier hospitality management centre in Asia for the present and future hospitality leaders and entrepreneurs. What, according to you, is the current status of Hospitality Management in India? What would be your advise for students considering this sector as a career option? Hospitality management has tradi-
sheena joseph
tionally included Hotels and Restaurant. With the surge of the service age the term hospitality as included many other service sectors like retail, event management, airlines, conventions, theme parks, hospitality education, cruise lines, banks, etc. It is for this reason 40% students who graduate from hotel management schools join industries other than hotel and restaurant. The competencies of hotel management students have been found useful in other service oriented industries as mentioned earlier. The number one problem of the hotel industry is people in terms of availability, quality and attrition. This is only going to get worst as we march onto 5.8 million rooms by 2020. Jobs are a plenty and students with a flair for hospitality will get meaningful careers. It is time that students start looking at service sector as the mainstay of their generation and develop those skills that matter in the service age. What is the USP of your institute? Any specific plans for placement of students? Ecole Hoteliere Lavasa is the only institute in India that is specifically designed to develop hospitality leaders and entrepreneurs. There is currently a shortage of management for hospitality. We prepare students for assistant management positions to take on higher management positions faster, because our curriculum has strong business management content. The second USP is our methodology of teaching. Most educational institutes in India use pedagogy where the onus of teaching lies with the teacher. We follow andragogy where the onus of acquiring knowledge lies with the students. The faculty act as learning facilitators and in fact are called that. The third USP is our facilities that no one in India has. We have five live restaurants within the college supported by five-star kitchens; twenty multimedia classrooms, Wi-Fi campus;
four auditoriums; a cyber hotel; and an amphitheatre to seat 600 students. Students will get their live training in 18 branded hotels being built in Lavasa, each a walking distance away. Can you tell about the kind of accreditation that students can expect from the institute? At the moment there is no education body that has a model to recognise our unique curriculum. We are waiting for the new changes in Education under the able stewardship of Mr. Kapil Sibal, Honorable Minister of Education. Our curriculum is that of a B.Sc. in Hospitality Management. We are also offering a Certificate duly recognised and signed by Ecole hoteliere de Lausanne. Students are permitted to transfer to Lausanne after two years to earn the Degree from Lausanne itself. Successful students are also eligible to enroll for their MBA in hospitality Management. Please elaborate on any new collaborations that the institute will be venturing into. We wish to bring in the MBA from Lausanne after two years. We also want to start several hospitality programmes for other service industries. We will be starting our Executive Development Programmes, led by international faculty specifically for the hospitality industry. What is the kind of support that the institute expects from the Government for promotion of the hospitality sector as a key education destination? The government has already done a lot for the tourism sector to make it the second largest in terms of growth in the world. What we need now is the Education Ministry to find a vehicle to recognise colleges of excellence like ours and give them independent degree status. Our present policies will only drag us into mediocrity. \\ digital LEARNING
july 2010
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