PERSPECTIVE
Reinventing the journey into hospitality
How redesigned employment pathways can unlock talent for employers and opportunity for communities
5-MINUTE READ
August 25, 2026
In brief
- Hospitality’s next generation of talent may already be within reach, but existing routes into work can leave too many capable people outside the pipeline.
- Redesigning employment pathways can help more people see hospitality as a career, overcome barriers to entry and prepare for open roles.
- Cross-sector partnerships can bring the right capabilities together, from community trust to digital learning, training and industry scale.
Priya’s story is illustrative, but the pattern is real. With better employment pathway design, often through minor adjustments to how businesses attract and support candidates for entry-level roles, more people can launch the careers they seek. Employers, in turn, can reach untapped talent pools, helping to address persistent entry-level staffing gaps.
The World Travel & Tourism Council identifies recruiting and retaining talent as the greatest single workforce challenge facing the industry today. By 2035, the hospitality industry is projected to face a shortfall of 8.6 million workers, leaving the sector roughly 18% below required staffing levels.
Drawing on the programs explored in this paper, we show how deliberately shaping employment pathways, the routes through which people discover, access, prepare for and enter work, can help organizations expand the talent pools they are able to recruit from.
Redesigning employment pathways to unlock new talent pools
A closer look at hospitality’s talent gap reveals why capable candidates are not always finding their way into open roles. Some face practical barriers before they reach an interview. Others may never have had the exposure to see hospitality as a career option in the first place.
The World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance (WSHA) has seen how practical barriers can intersect with questions of trust, safety and family support. In Sri Lanka, one hotel working with the TUI Academy learned that a qualified young candidate was hesitant to accept a role because the hotel was far from her village, the hours felt unfamiliar and her family was concerned about her safety. By inviting her mother to visit the property and met the security and support staff, the hotel helped address concerns that might otherwise have prevented her from accepting the role.
In India, Accenture, Marriott International and local nonprofit partners designed a pathway that brings together community outreach, family engagement, residential training, paid internships and placement support. In the program’s first 12 months, more than 3,100 young people across India completed training and more than 2,500 entered hospitality roles, an 80% placement rate.
In the UK, Accenture and Marriott International are working with Movement to Work and Springpod to help more young people explore hospitality careers through two virtual work simulations before moving into coaching and in-person hotel placements. The model shows how digital learning can help widen access, build confidence and turn early interest into readiness.
Across these examples, the principle is consistent: identify what is keeping capable people out of the talent pipeline, then redesign the pathway around those barriers.
In the first 12 months of the program in India
+3,100
young people across India completed training
+2,500
entered hospitality roles
80%
placement rate
From inspiring examples to coordinated action
It requires collective action to widen access, create more visible pathways into hospitality careers and support people not just to enter the sector, but to grow there.
Glenn Mandziuk / President and Chief Executive Officer of WSHA
Tackling hospitality’s talent gap requires deliberate action on three fronts: helping more people enter the sector, supporting new hires beyond day one in a rapidly changing environment, and building cross-sector partnerships that make these efforts more effective and scalable.
These insights point to three broad priorities
01
Invest in employment pathway redesign
Employers need to understand the realities preventing capable candidates from applying for or accepting roles, then design pathways that respond to those barriers.
02
Build for scale through partnership
Identify the right partners for each barrier: community organizations and nonprofits that already hold trust with the people employers are trying to reach, organizations with a vested interest in creating employment pathways who can help design and scale them, training providers who can translate potential into work-readiness and industry bodies who can turn what works in one market into a model others can adopt.
03
Recognize that the pathway doesn’t end at placement
Getting people through the door is only the beginning. Across industries, the roles and expectations placed on workers are changing faster than the support structures around them. In hospitality, AI is already changing what the work involves. Effective employment pathways are designed to include support that evolves with the work, helping new hires understand where technology such as AI can assist, where human judgment matters most and how to build confidence as expectations change.