Feature
Issue No. 17 - June/July 2004
Tourism Knows How
If good help is hard to find, get busy and make some.
Obviously that’s the attitude of veteran restaurateur Nick Papazahariakis, who is lending his time and enthusiasm to the cause of training in South Australia.
A man of few words (for his profession) Nick is nonetheless a passionate advocate of skills development. For the past five years he has been a director of Tourism Training South Australia, an Industry Training Advisory Board in the federal education structure.
TTSA offers its industry a say in how its employees are shaped. Advice from TTSA influences curriculum development at vocational education level, such as at TAFE, and helps determine where that education is delivered.
Deliberate funding cuts have made TTSA entrepreneurial. It needs to ‘sell’ its intellectual property – customer relations – to other business sectors as well as its own. Nick finds the need to sell irritating, but other industries need the customer relations skills.
"While there may be synergies with our sector they are not completely overlapping," Nick points out. For example, as fishing companies branch out into aquaculture and sports fishery tourism, they need staff who know the subject and have client liaison skills.
"Wine tourism is another area that would benefit from training in customer ethics and service training," Nick says.
Tourism employs thousands of people and represents significant income for the state. Good training is essential for the best possible outcome, so it’s imperative that TTSA thrives and gets its job done.
"We are being very aggressive, obviously because of survival, since our dollars have been cut to peanuts, but also because these sectors need to learn how to do other jobs. We need to achieve and be proactive rather than wait for things to happen."
Lateral thinking is obviously important. TTSA’s clever idea has been to ‘sell’ its collected information and techniques ‘upstream’, ...
