More needs to be done to help travel and tourism graduates find work but graduates need to also help themselves, according to recruiters.

Last week, Institute of Travel and Tourism chairman Steven Freudmann, speaking at the ITT’s first Question Time event in Manchester, said the industry should be “embarrassed” by the fact that travel and tourism graduates seldom ever find jobs in the sector.

But Naomi Pearce, travel specialist at Vector Resourcing, told Recruiter that in today’s difficult jobs market graduates need to arm themselves with work experience. “We do come across people who are new and in the market. When you are sourcing a contractor on a short-term basis, a lot of the time you are looking for someone who has done it before.

“It is experience. I spoke to a young chap who was going off to Europe to work for a company just to get some experience. If they can prove they have this, it is a step in the right direction.”

And Martine Sullivan, director at Argyll Rercuitment, who recruits mainly mid to senior management, told Recruiter that travel has a different attitude to graduates.  “In travel, not everyone has come through the graduate route. They have started at the bottom and worked their way up.

“It is not like the banking sector where people are fast tracked. That only really happens in the larger travel firms like Tui or Thomas Cook that have official graduate schemes.”