Event volunteering as an educational resource in business tourism

Sa？etak The growth of the business tourism industry globally has catalysed the need for responsive academic programmes to cultivate skilled graduates for the meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions (MICE) sector. The vocational nature of the industry requires academic programmes to provide students with the opportunity to fortify the hard and soft skills required to manage business tourism events by means of industry exposure initiatives. The purpose of this paper is to explore students' perspectives on volunteering at business events to assist educators effectively in utilising volunteer participation as a means to meet students' educational needs in partnership with industry. This qualitative study generated data from 15 interviews with event management student volunteers at the 17th World Conference for Tobacco or Health (WCTOH) in Cape Town, South Africa. Following Creswell's steps for qualitative data analysis, thematically categorised results reveal that students' motivation to volunteer is closely linked to self-improvement goals, and suggest that students have a strong desire to learn from the event organiser (EO) as opposed to just being a helping hand. The research concludes that purposeful collaboration between educators and industry practitioners is required to utilise event volunteering opportunities effectively as a way of enhancing business tourism education