‘Our Curriculum Meets the Challenges of the Business Environment’

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The HSE master's programme 'Experience Economy: Hospitality Management and Tourism' offers knowledge which is required in business, but not yet widely available in textbooks. Marina Predvoditeleva, Academic Supervisor of the programme, speaks about the innovations that will be introduced to the programme curriculum in the next academic year.

The principles of student training

Hospitality and tourism are not a closed world. This area is constantly acquiring advanced technologies and management practices from other fields. While preparing the programme, we work with one eye on the future — we focus on problems emerging in various areas (not necessarily in Russia). We already teach what will be practiced in Russian hotel and tourism business in a few years, although now it may seem to be fantasy.

We do not give students only time-proven knowledge. The classic is good and useful, but the business landscape changes rapidly, and we and our students can't afford to be slow off the blocks.

Our studying process is based on three elements: 

  internationalization

  business contacts

  focus on research 

Each of these elements is updated annually, and continually developed in order to make the curriculum more interesting and relevant, so that it meets the challenges of the modern business environment.

About our new courses

Innovations for the next academic year are aimed at the transfer of ‘proactive’ knowledge.

Thus, we're launching the ‘Introduction to Data Science’ course, and this is a big deal. Working with data has already become a compulsory part of HSE's undergraduate studies. Now we're offering it to the students of our programme — it will certainly be useful to them in their future careers.

The course ‘Digital technologies in hospitality and tourism’, will also be transformed - it will include such topics as blockchain, the Internet of things, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Focusing on teaching specific knowledge, we're introducing two new courses in finance — ‘Economics of hotel and tourism business’ and ‘Financial management and financial modeling in the hospitality industry and tourism’.

Let’s not forget about soft skills: existing courses will feature the latest approaches to leadership and team building (including the concepts of teaming and ‘leader without a title’). These courses will enable students to develop design thinking, negotiation skills and so on.

About new career trajectory

It is worth noticing that it’s not only the HSE faculty who deliver lectures to our students.

Marina Predvoditeleva

 

Our colleagues hold key positions in different companies, and are therefore able to share knowledge which is not yet in textbooks, but already in demand in business.

In addition to the new courses, during the 2019/20 academic year we will be starting to work on a new career trajectory for our students: travel departments of large companies and the MICE-industry. Various events, such as the Russian Hospitality Awards, can be used as an example of activity in this field. Such specialists are in demand on the market, and we have the resources for this training.

New partnerships abroad

Another innovation in our programme is related to internationalization. We have signed an exchange agreement with LUISS Business School (Rome) — students will be able to spend a semester there on the English-language programme ‘Master in Tourism Management’.

This academic mobility programme will be the third in our portfolio: our students can already study on exchange programmes at the University of Bologna and at MCI Management Center, Innsbruck.

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