Abstract
The rapid expansion of China’s tourism and hospitality (T&H) industry has generated increasing demand for graduates equipped with both professional and transferable skills. Guizhou Province, one of China’s less-developed inland provinces, presents a distinct socio-economic and educational landscape characterised by regional disparities in higher education resources and graduate employment opportunities. As tourism serves as a strategic pillar industry for regional development (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2024), understanding how students in this southwestern context develop employability is critical for addressing structural inequalities and informing locally responsive higher education policies. This study therefore investigates how tourism and hospitality undergraduates in Guizhou develop employability and how multi-level factors including micro, meso, and macro collectively influence this process.Guided by Tomlinson’s (2017) Graduate Capital Model and Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Ecological Systems Theory, the research adopts a sequential exploratory mixed-methods design comprising two phases. The qualitative phase involved 28 semi-structured interviews with 18 students and 10 university staff members across four universities in Guizhou Province, generating rich insights into stakeholders’ perceptions of employability and the challenges of talent cultivation. These findings informed the development of a self-administered questionnaire used in the quantitative phase, which collected 1,004 valid responses from students in Guizhou. Data were analysed using SPSS and AMOS, employing Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to validate the measurement and structural models.The final structural model demonstrated strong goodness-of-fit and confirmed that micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors each positive effects on employability development, which in turn influences the development of students’ graduate capital. The findings reveal the multi-layered and interdependent nature of employability formation.Theoretically, this study enriches employability scholarship by integrating Tomlinson’s Graduate Capital framework with a multi-level ecological perspective, thereby extending the conceptualisation of employability beyond individual attributes to encompass institutional and structural influences. By empirically validating this integrated model within an under-researched inland Chinese higher education context, the study contributes to ongoing debates on contextualised and relational understandings of tourism and hospitality students’ employability.Practically, the findings provide targeted implications for policymakers, university leaders, and industry stakeholders, particularly in economically peripheral regions. The study informs regional higher education reform, curriculum enhancement, and education–industry collaboration strategies aimed at strengthening tourism and hospitality students’ employability development.
Awarding Institution(s)
University of Plymouth
Supervisor
Rong Huang, Danqing Liu
Document Type
Thesis
Publication Date
2026
Embargo Period
2026-04-17
Deposit Date
April 2026
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Wu, J. (2026) Investigating the Employability Development of Tourism and Hospitality Undergraduates in Guizhou, China: A Mixed Methods Study. Thesis. University of Plymouth. Retrieved from https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/pbs-theses/319
