The newly appointed Director General of the National Institute For Hospitality and Tourism, Alhaji Nura Kangiwa, says he is seeking stakeholders collaboration to sanitize the hospitality and tourism industry and will focus on digitalising the institute by ensuring old equipment and materials were replaced with modern ones to pace up with global best practice.
At a meeting with newsmen after a facility tour of institute’s Lagos campus, Alhaji Kangiwa, said standardisation remained paramount in hospitality management which is the key to domestic tourism pointing out that upgrading the training institute became necessary for training and retraining of world class tourism marketers and hospitality operators.
Alhaji Kangiwa said that plans are underway to train best destination managers, employ good marketing plan, adding that NIHOTOUR would be upscaling its trainings to produce efficient hospitality professionals.
He said that the major yearnings of the industry in terms of grooming professionals to service the industry will be focused on greatly with lots of developmental strides.
Alhaji Kangiwa said that NIHOTOUR was saddled with the huge responsibility for basic hospitality trainings and other vocational qualification programmes and the plan is to engage best brains across the globe to carry out most of the trainings.
He said that the only way to tackle unemployment problem in the country was to harness the creative industry properly which happened to constitute 70 per cent employment opportunities.
Alhaji Kangiwa said that the Institute also planned to carry the National Assembly along in its process of ungrading for provision of sufficient funds to help the youths and women in the creative industry to be productive and independent.
He noted that the National Assembly will also be educated on the quality of NIHOTOUR certification as unemployed youths could secure jobs overseas with the certification and noted that NIHOTOUR was rated one of the best top ten authorised training centres in Africa in August, 2012 by the International Air Transportation Association (IATA) and in 2015 it became top in Africa and the world , and with the certificate, unemployed youths can secure jobs abroad.
He urged stakeholders in the hospitality industry to employ qualified staff and avail their employees the training opportunities.
