Introduction

Tourism enabled people to move beyond the mentality of being tied to one location and encounter other thought worlds. In essence, tourism is about the time space compression of societies, as the result of diminishing costs and increasing ease of international travel for purposes of leisure, by enabling increasing numbers of people from nearly all Western social classes . . . to escape their routine environment and experiences (Held, et al., 1999).

In many countries around the world, tourism education and training curricula focus on the workforce, which is responsible for planning, marketing, and delivering of quality service and maintaining productivity to keep the tourism sector competitive. Education is the act or process of imparting knowledge. Training may be defined as the process of bringing a person to an agreed standard of proficiency for responsibilities through practice or instruction. Both education and training are communicative and interactive in nature, that is, both bring about developmental transfer of concepts, methods, and models from the initial context of learning to the context of the classroom and on to the professional career context, where knowledge and competencies are applied in particular tasks.

The education and professional tourism career interface lies at the very heart (Airey, 1998) of the issues, challenges, and the opportunities for education and professional careers in tourism (Gee, 1980; Hawkins and Hunt, 1988; Bratton, Go, and Ritchie, 1991; EIESP, 1991; Parsons, 1991; Go 1994; 1998). It provides a focus for dilemmas, such as, how to develop...