EU Project: #IDEATE

With unemployment remaining high and employees tending to move around more during their careers, tourism represents an industry offering meaningful employment opportunities. Therefore, it suffers from a misalignment among:

• job seekers having a negative perception of the sector in terms of job quality, seasonality and limited career prospects, which turns into a major number of low-skilled workers;
• tourists, and then SMEs and operators, requiring for professional high-skilled workforce capable of offering innovative and customized tourism experiences, that are worthy of time, money and recommendations of tourists.

In this framework, a holistic approach should be taken for keeping European tourism destinations attractive for tourists, job seekers and businesses, while being it straightforward the high level of complementarity and interdependency of different actors in the value creation process.

#IdEATE, an 18 month project with 10 partners from 6 European countries, develops a sustainable model helping to connect main players active in the field of tourism (job seekers, prospective employers and SMEs, training institutions, public authorities) with the aim to facilitate the uptake of high quality jobs, apprenticeships and traineeships positions in the tourism sector across the EU.

It is meaningfully addressed to strengthen the image of careers in the tourism sector through the exploitation of opportunities offered by the Internet and social networks, and is essentially based on collaborative approach, engagement, storytelling and relationships, actually among the main strategies used to attract tourists towards destinations.

The project supports the creation a professional network specialized in the tourism sector that essentially offers and shares contents that have value to its audience. Its innovative nature is embedded in a model based on a multi-sided platform which can play a transformative role in the tourism sector by taking advantage of network effects.