Portraits of Cambodian social entrepreneurs : narratives from the Don Bosco Hotel School

Abstract

This study uses ethnographic portraits of hotel school managers to identify specific soft skills lacking in Cambodian hospitality students and to examine the complex obstacles that the managers face when providing soft skills education. In Cambodia, 30% of the population lives under the poverty line (“UNICEF Cambodia Statistics,” n.d.). Meanwhile, the service and hospitality sector has grown to represent 39% of the country’s real GDP share (“Growth in service sector brings more challenges,” n.d.), making it an attractive industry for young workers to find employment and improve livelihoods. However, the World Bank identifies that there is a gap in young Cambodian workers’ skills, especially soft skills (Brixi, Van Adams, D’Amico, & Krauss, 2012). The qualitative portraiture method is used in the study to lend a more detailed perspective on school challenges since the existing literature on the soft skills deficiency in Cambodia is largely quantitative in nature. For this portraiture study, managers from the Don Bosco Hotel School, the largest hotel school in Cambodia, were chosen as protagonists. The findings reveal that the main soft skills lacking in students are: responsibility, self-assessment, honesty, self-confidence, teamwork, and culture sensitization. The findings also show that major obstacles hotel school managers faced when educating students in soft skills are: high staff turnover, lack of role models, short duration of training programs, lack of nutrition, problems with students’ families, and a shortage of external exchange opportunities. By humanizing the dialogue beyond quantitative statistics, a richer and more meaningful ecosystem of information can emerge. With greater contextual understanding, stakeholders in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors can create more sustainable changes for Cambodian hospitality soft skills training.