Challenges faced by the tourism industrial training students due to the Covid-19

Final year undergraduates are required to undergo industrial training programs as it is a compulsory requirement to graduate. The training helps the students to experience real-life working scenarios in their field of study to develop excellent employability skills. Nonetheless, as soon as The World Health Organization, 2020 declared the COVID-19 as a pandemic, COVID-19 has affected other industries throughout the world with no exception to the hospitality industry. Tourism, in particular, has been hit massively. Almost the entire enterprise needs to be closed during the movement control order. At the same time, it affects the final students who are undergoing their industrial training. In conjunction with the current issues, a qualitative study was conducted to discover the challenges faced by industrial training students of Faculty of Hotel and Tourism Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Melaka Campus. This paper conducted a semi-structured interview as its qualitative method, aiming to identify issues and challenges among the students that occured during the period of industrial training due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Measures taken by industry and faculty to overcome the challenges were also discussed in this paper.