PA4T Partnership

Partnership Action for Tourism

Project summary

This partnership seeks to find a route to bring mentoring techniques to mangers in the Hospitality Leisure Travel and Tourism sector in Europe, and establish a pan-European standard of competence.

The partnership has been formed from a nation with an established sector that uses mentoring techniques in the workplace, together with two nations with established sectors but do not use mentoring, and a further two with emergent sectors.

The partnership seeks to increase the incidence and value of mentoring within the partners’ nations, and disseminate further.

Project partners

The project is led by Gecko Programmes.

The other active partners in Europe are:

• Shine People and Places in London, UK
• Mentoring Central in Ostrava, Czech Republic
• X-Panel in Aradippou, Cyprus
• National Agency for Development of SMEs in Bratislava, Slovakia

What’s mentoring

Mentoring is a powerful developmental way of helping people, businesses and communities. It taps into a basic instinct most people share – the desire to pass on their learning and to help other people develop and fulfil their potential.

Mentoring is a technique to exchange and embed knowledge and skills into workplace practices that develops both people and organisations.

Mentoring is a developed and used technique for staff development in many nations in the west of the EU community, and it has been particularly successful in the HLTT sector, both at developing people and at addressing the gender inequality through resultant career development opportunities.  This has led to better standards of service and to improved people and resource management, and having the impact of improving businesses. The impacts upon the people and the organisations are of interest to all the partners.

Project objectives

The project has five main objectives:

- Comparison between formal and non formal training paths for Mentors, including the access to on-line learning opportunities.

- Identification of competences for Mentors

- Increase the value of the strategic informal and non formal competences of Mentors

- Identify the incidence of use of mentoring techniques in the HLTT sector in partners’ nations.

- Improve the quality of European mobility for HLTT managers who act as Mentors, highlighting opportunities and obstacles.

Project Impact

The routine of identifying competence and learning opportunities, and then to share better practice amongst the partner nations, will have the impacts of improving the quality of mangers in the sector, and improve the quality of European mobility.  The recognition of mentoring skills as a cost-effective technique for staff development has the potential to impact upon the HLTT sector (and others outside of the scope of the project) in the EU community, addressing recruitment, gender mix, skills requirements, and the incidence of the mobility of labour.

Project progress

The inaugural meeting was held in Wolverhampton, UK from the 23^rd to 25^th of November 2011. All the partners had a chance for the first time to meet each other and to present their organisations. Gaby from Shine People and Places presented a good practice, a project that was very successful in UK and might be inspiring for other partners. During the meeting we discussed the project plan focusing on products, responsibilities and timeline.

Inaugural Meeting Minute

We also visited the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley as a great place in a touristic map in West Midlands.