Organizations in the 21th century have to address the problem of employee's retention as it has direct and indirect costs for the organisation. In regards to this issue several theories have emerged pointing out the strong relationship between retention and employee's motivation. This last topic is not trivial, as it includes factors from different disciplines such as the psychological or managerial ones. The aim of this paper is to analyse the current literature related to different work motivation theories in order to identify patterns, which might help to understand better the dynamics between motivation at work and its impact on employee retention. In order to do so a detailed revision of the literature has been done classifying the main motivational theories in needs, traits, values, and cognition.Results of the above analysis highlight the "satisfaction of a need" as a common denominator in the motivational theories. Need theories explain why someone must act but they do not explain why particular actions are followed in specific situations. One of the insights is that values are the ones that unveil what drives individuals to achieve a goal. Therefore it is vital for organizations to learn and understand which ones are the employees work values in order to retain them and keep them motivated.

The hospitality sector is one of the most competitive industries and it is one of the leading engines of the world economy. The current crisis in the sector due to the COVID-19 makes organizations to consider more than ever the unique and the alignment of their services for becoming different from their competitors. In this sense, the hospitality skills have been identified as one of the crucial elements in the strategy by the companies because of the wide and diverse offer of tourism services and, at the same time, the new customer expectations which are pushing the organizations to create customized, unique and memorable experiences. Thus, this change of paradigm leads to a constant reflection on the quality that services should offer in line with customer expectations. The aim of this research is twofold. On the one hand, the article identifies service orientation, empathy and teamwork as key competences in the development of the hospitality skills. On the other hand, the paper presents a learning framework of those skills within the University studies. This framework proposes an incremental learning process organized in three phases -Discover, Reflection and Experience- through the period of the academic program. First, the identification of their hospitality profile based on the three skills is done through a discovered process. Next, students reflect about the contents and best practices related to strategical and operational aspects linked to the sector. Finally, students experience all the previous concepts through an internship. One of the main benefits of this learning framework is that allows academic supervisors to define goals and monitoring the achievement of these competences of the students along the different academic years.

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