Through implementing the project, we aimed to equip the participants with the requirements of the hospitality and tourism sector. We wanted to create opportunities for our students to experience and adapt new vocational skills in their fields in Europe. We intended to support their vocational training by giving them development chances in an international frame. Although the activities were primarily based on learners’ hands-on training, we believed the project outcomes would serve a lot to our organization’s educational missions. We wanted to support our school’s educational objectives by creating an international working area to improve original and exclusive teaching materials that we could use for years. We also aimed to improve our organizational capacity to cooperate with other VET partners in Europe. As tourism is a dynamic and fast-growing sector, it wasn’t possible for our organization to offer vocational education and training without getting in touch and collaborating with other VET providers in Europe. By adapting good practices in food and beverage service field on an international base, we intended to develop an internationally- acknowledged vocational profile which was among our long-term educational goals.
Offering a strong practice-based training, our school seeks ways to improve the educational fields in its body. Of these fields, food and beverage service is among the most important ones with many open–to–development areas. We applied for this project considering that our students and staff were in need of new methods and good practices in the field of food and bevarge services in the tourism and hospitality sector. Although the hotels in Turkey have generally good food and bevarge service standards with high-quality service to their guests, the educational value of the training offered at hotel management and hospitality schools like ours is usually neglected as it is very difficult to create opportunities for VET students without building a cooperation bond with the hotel establishments in Europe. Therefore, the vocational gap between what is offered at VET schools and what is expected at the sector generally causes F&B service students to lead to other sectors after graduation by leaving their places to untrained people. Through our internationalization strategy based on realistic goals and priorities, we aimed to narrow the educational gap between sectoral practices and vocational training combining theory and practice.