Fostering the development of future tourism and hospitality professionals' employability skills through the use of podcasting technology

As business environments keep changing and evolving so do professionals from various fields find themselves in the need of developing various employability skills. One such skill is communication in foreign languages and one way of developing language competence, in a timely manner, is to apply different technology in tertiary education language study. Podcasts are considered a complex yet simple way of developing students' language competence and this study aims at investigating the level of podcast effectiveness in improving the English language vocabulary knowledge of students of tourism and hospitality. The results of quantitative research show that listening to podcasts improves students' vocabulary scores. Namely, the mean score for the post-test of the experimental group indicates a positive and significant difference in vocabulary knowledge of EFL students. This way, future tourism and hospitality professionals will have developed an important soft skill even before becoming active participants in the labor market.