Malaysian tourism student’s awareness of the emerging event industry / Asliza Mohd Yusof ... [et al.]

The event industry is becoming one of the fastest growing and most lucrative areas of the tourism industry worldwide. Malaysia continues to gain world recognition for the excellence of its convention and exhibition facilities and on their attractive places to organize an event. Since event management has emerged to become an important sector of the Malaysian tourism industry, this has given some impetus to the need for tertiary educated event managers. Taking an initiative to highlight the needs of an appropriate conservation maintenance management, this study will present an evaluation the relationship between event education and awareness of the students of its emergence and student awareness of the emerging event industry in Malaysia. Among others, this study will explore and examines the emerging event industry from student's view on the types of event that they are most interested in, the skills and attributes for a successful event management and their potentiality to be involved in the event industry in future. Data for this exploratory research were collected from secondary and primary sources through structured questionnaires. Prior to this, a pilot test was conducted on a targeted sample comprises of students of Dept. of Tourism & Hotel Management of UiTM (Shah Alam, Malacca, Sabah and Penang) and students from School of Tourism Management, DUM Campus. The results were then used as answers for the questionnaire set. The collection of data was carried out through a self-administered
survey in August 2004. Results obtained from the answered questionnaire s were analyzed by using the "Statistical Package for the Social Sciences" of SPSS for Windows method that allowed comprehensive applications and the ability to generate frequencies, descriptive statistics and other analysis to be reported. Findings of this research confirm high awareness level of the tourism student on the emerging event industry in Malaysia. In future, it is recommended that a more in-depth research to be carried out to determine the influence of event industry on the tourism sector in Malaysia.