Mentors committee meets for second time this year |26 June 2020

Members of the committee during the meeting yesterday (Photo: Jude Morel)

The Mentors Committee, chaired by the Minister for Tourism, Civil Aviation, Ports and Marine Didier Dogley and principal secretary in the department of tourism Anne Lafortune, met yesterday to discuss issues pertaining to human resource in the tourism industry, notably the participation of Seychellois hospitality graduates at top-level management within the sector as well as issues pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The committee, comprising principal secretary for employment Jules Baker, principal of the Seychelles Tourism Academy (STA) Flavien Joubert, general managers of different hotels as well as representatives of the different cohorts of graduates from Shannon College, Ireland, seeks to ensure that the graduates have the maximum support of government and private sectors so they can occupy top management positions at large hotel establishments.

“The purpose of the meeting is to ensure the wellbeing of the graduates upon completion of their studies at the Shannon College of Hotel Management in Ireland,” said Minister Dogley.

To kick-start the meeting Minister Dogley began by acknowledging the fact that this year Seychelles will not be able to send any of its students to Shannon University due to the global pandemic, but noted that they are looking into the option of online classes or deferring them to next year.

“As you know, most hotels employed expatriate workers as there was a lack of qualified Seychellois for the positions. But the programme gives about twelve students the opportunity to train in Europe and then return and work in hotels by ensuring that they have opportunities to get employment as managers when they come back to replace the expatriate workers,” he said.

Recently many expatriate workers have left the country due to the expiration of their GOP and Minister Dogley commented on this by saying that the vacant posts are not necessarily posts that the hotels need for the time being as tourists are lacking but hopefully when those posts reopen qualified Seychellois will be able to fill it.

“The committee has been for some years now working and we will continue to work even though we don’t have tourists as this gives us an opportunity to see how we can improve ourselves for when we re-start our tourist season and to input how we can utilise more of our local workforce that we are training,” said Minister Dogley.

Christophe Zialor