Korea’s Tourism College and University Student Career Choice: What is Important?

Employment issues after graduation have become a global issue with jobs appearing scarcer on the world stage. The Tourism and Hospitality (T&H) industry, being a service industry, is one of the areas that is targeted as a growth opportunity area still by the Park Geun-hye government in the Republic of Korea (ROK). The current research with 300 ROK Freshmen tourism students in colleges (N=150) and universities (N=150) was conducted to study their perception on factors they value in their future career, and whether they perceived these same values within the T&H industry as a career. Each group was individually analyzed using t-tests; and then the college and university groups were analyzed using a t-test to see if there was significant difference between them. Eleven factors showed significance for the university group and eight factors showed significance for the college group. Of the 20 factors analyzed, only the factor “a job that is respected” showed significant difference in importance to future employment between the two groups; two factors indicated significant difference between the extent T&H offered those factors in their future employment, namely: “a job that is respected”; “reasonable workload.” The above results are considered to previous studies done in Europe, Australia and America to help better understand the ROK tourism students’ career decision making within the larger geo-political framework.