Entry-level professional competencies and skills in tourism – The case of Slovakia

The aim of the article is to analyse the requirements concerning education, experience, personal qualities, language and other skills and any other knowledge required in the recruitment process by tourism industry. Through the content analysis and text mining approach (using the WordStat software tool), the structured data from 978 online job advertisements (569 companies) in the tourism industry was processed. The labour market does not provide enough job offers that would explicitly require higher education. When defining required personal qualities and skills, employers prefer their soft version. From the employers’ point of view, the data obtained is important for tailoring recruitment messages and writing job advertisements. At the same time, they allow academic institutions to adapt tourism study programs better to the market needs. The article presents the first comprehensively processed results of one of the Central European countries.