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This article explores a set of emerging competencies that education providers will be increasingly compelled to consider, and more importantly, embed in their event management course offerings. The undergraduate event management program offered at Victoria University, Melbourne, provides a case study of the efforts of teaching staff to iteratively and reflectively integrate these emerging competencies into course curriculum, many of which will be required for graduates to successfully transition to work in their career sector of choice, the events industry. The competencies of sustainable development, creativity and innovation and networking are all seen as vital to graduate outcomes and employability. The fundamental responses to this process are discussed leading to a distillation of the implications for teaching practice associated with embedding emerging competencies in event management education.

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has caused the event industry and providers of tertiary event management courses to reflect on the nature of future events and the form they will take. With hybrid, virtual and innovative events being foreseen for the coming years, skills taught in the relevant programs and courses also need to be reassessed and restructured. Using qualitative, semi-structured interviews, this research explores the viewpoints on requisite future skills from three groups of event stakeholders – professionals, lecturers, and students – across three countries, China, Germany and Australia. The results show agreement on what event management skills will be needed, among which technical and digital expertise, communication, innovation and leadership are seen as the most important.

In the growing field of volunteer tourism research, studies have investigated participant motivations and the benefits accruing to both travellers and the community, as well as undertaking critical assessments of the phenomenon. Comparatively little attention has been paid to changes associated with the post-volunteer period and particularly to the likelihood of volunteer tourists making contributions within their home communities.Using the Expectancy-Disconfirmation Paradigm (EDP), this study explores the impacts of the volunteer tourism experience on the intentions of volunteer tourists to undertake other variants of volunteering post-trip. The expectations of respondents and their volunteering disconfirmations were measured over the course of travel using a two-round online survey to study the effects of these constructs on respondent intentions to volunteer in their home communities. No strong evidence was found that volunteer tourism acts as a recruitment medium for future volunteering. The research concludes by restating the unresolved question of whether the weak links between volunteer tourism and home community volunteering symptomatise the shallowness of a phenomenon that benefits the privileged or whether volunteer tourism provides a genuine mechanism for developing global citizens who think global and act local.