Innovating university tourism curriculum to meet the challenge of free labour movement in ASEAN

Abstract

In order to encourage cooperation in many aspects within the area, on August 9, 2016, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) officially announced Mutual Recognition Arrangement on Tourism Professionals (MRA-TP). As such, from then the tourism labour forces of member countries have more job opportunities but also face more challenges because of competition within the area. In this context, training tourism labour force becomes a challenge and thus requires innovations to adapt to important changes in the labour market. This paper focusses on analyzing several university tourism programmes at the undergraduate level in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, etc. in order to suggest improvements for tourism programmes in Vietnam, which can assist Vietnamese labour force in integrating into the area.