The GW School of Business International Institute of Tourism Studies will offer a new professional certificate program in hospitality management and leadership this spring.
The online program consists of six courses led by experts in the hospitality industry that will equip professionals with expertise in hotel and resort management, according to the program’s website. Larry Yu, a professor of hospitality management, said they designed the courses and objectives of the program around skills that entry-level and mid-managers in the hospitality industry should be familiar with, like customer service.
“We have complete, professional and continued education opportunities for students on campus and also for professionals working in the industry to advance, to upscale their knowledge and to reskill, retool their knowledge, and if they want to elevate their career and working with a very celebrated team of instructors for this hospitality program,” Yu said.
Yu said discussions of expanding the institute’s continued education activities and opportunities for professionals first began before the pandemic to compete with other universities, community colleges and for-profit education companies with similar programs. He said he and Seleni Matus, the director of the institute, began working on the specific aspects of the program last year and building the curriculum after discussions with other faculty and industry experts.
“I think the support was very positive from the school,” Yu said. “Since this summer, we started to work on the details, building the website and committing the faculty for the six courses.”
Yu said the certificate program is nondegree bearing and provides continuing education credits with participants required to have the equivalent of a high school diploma, although a bachelor’s degree is strongly encouraged.
The program will offer the courses Inclusive Leadership in Hospitality, Global Talent Development and Sustainable Hospitality Strategies in the spring. The program will add three more courses, Hospitality Financial Management, Hospitality Digital Marketing and Hospitality Business Analytics, in the fall, according to the program’s website.
The workload for each course will entail lectures, readings, discussion board posts, guest lectures and a final assignment. The courses have an estimated time commitment of approximately 10 to 12 hours per course and have a pass-fail grading system, according to the program’s website.
Yu said the key difference between the certificate program in hospitality management and leadership in comparison to the institute’s other programs is how it integrates all the different functional areas of business. The other tourism-related programs that the institute offers include event management, destination management and cultural tourism, but the new program integrates many aspects of business management.
“Hospitality is more business focused in this case. We basically discuss how to manage a hotel, and so to do that, there are many business functions used or applied in running a business of hospitality,” Yu said. “Most of the disciplines we teach in the business school can be used as functional skills and knowledge in running a hotel.”
Yu is the program’s sole academic instructor and will teach the Sustainable Hospitality Strategies course in April 2025. The course will focus on the environment, society and governance designs and approaches within hospitality to reduce climate impacts and conserve resources.
“This course really will be focusing on ESG, championed by all the International Hospitality organizations,” Yu said. “So in doing this, as you can see, we integrate all the different functional areas in business, in hospitality management and also focusing on leadership.”
Yu said the courses will assist existing professionals in the hospitality industry to lead hospitality business and operations. He said the skills that students will acquire from the certificate program, like customer service, also apply to other sectors, like health care, the military, artificial intelligence, sustainability and marketing.
Yu said, as industry professionals, he and his fellow instructors have helped students find internship and job opportunities in the past, with one of his students recently getting a job at the Watergate Hotel.
“My advice is that if you have a passion for working in the hospitality industry, this will be a good way to expose yourself to an industry,” Yu said.
Yu said the virtual format of the program also paves the way for the institute to expand the reach of professionals participating in the program by appealing to different regions of the U.S or other regions of the world if they see the program’s value.
Yu said the program aims to have around 15 to 20 participants in its first cohort and to soon begin marketing the program more “vigorously” to promote the certificate program.
Gregg Rockett, an academic lecturer and hospitality industry thought leader, will teach the certificate program’s course on Inclusive Leadership in Hospitality. He said this specific module will inform participants about motivating team members, linking job satisfaction and organizational culture as well as leadership and diversity in the workforce.
“What this course hopes to do is instill in hospitality professionals and understanding between what is management and what is leadership and concepts like emotional intelligence and how it manifests itself in leadership qualities,” Rockett said.
Rockett said he worked as a hospitality professional at Marriott and Hilton throughout most of his career, and he later began pursuing career academia in 2019 through multiple university programs. He said the concept of inclusive leadership as it relates to his course has significantly evolved since working with Hilton in the 2000s.
Rockett said he will give examples of his personal experiences in the hospitality industry within his online course to illustrate how leadership works and bring in a guest speaker to share their real life experience.
“I spent 35 years in the hospitality industry and saw its evolution and learned from some of the best hospitality companies in the world,” Rockett said. “So what I’m hoping to bring to the table, particularly in my course is, apart from theory and skills, what is practical application of that in the industry? How can you practically apply yourself to be a good leader, as opposed to the theory behind it?”
