Assessment of Employee Development, Skills Gap andProductivity in the Hotel Industry in Plateau State, Nigeria.

Abstract

This study evaluated the impact of employee development and the skills gap on productivity in a sample of hotels in Nigeria's Plateau State. The study used a descriptive research design and a survey methodology. The managers of all hotels registered with the Plateau State Tourism Corporation made up the study population. The hotels that were sampled and the sample size were chosen using the purposive sampling technique. A standardized questionnaire that was given to 57 managers was used to gather the quantitative data. Inferential statistics (chi-squared logistic binary test) were used to test the hypothesis while descriptive statistics (frequency count, percentage, mean, and standard deviation) were utilized to analyze the quantitative data.  The results showed that there are deficiencies in both technical and soft skills, which have an impact on employee productivity. The consequences include losing customers to competitors, rising operational costs, challenges in maintaining high standards of quality, low productivity, failure to implement new working procedures, and complaints and unhappiness from customers. The results also indicated that productivity suffers from a lack of personnel development. The outcome of hypothesis 2 showed that although there is a skills gap, it does not significantly affect productivity in the hotel sector in Plateau State. The study comes to the conclusion that staff training and development is the answer to the skills gap and increased productivity. It is recommended that hotel managers and supervisors describe the needed and available abilities of their staff in order to pinpoint any skill gaps and provide suitable training initiatives. Hotel owners will find the study useful.

Keywords:Employee Development, Skills Gap, Productivity, Hotel industry, Plateau State.