As the market for face-to-face meetings and events has grown to one of the largest private sector industries, so has the market for catering, which is the largest budget line item for a meeting or event. Clients have become more demanding and at the same time more price-conscious. This has caused catering professionals and meeting and event planners\u27 job responsibilities to change. Caterers and planners now have more crossover responsibilities and over more varied functional areas than ever before. In response, the National Association for Catering and Events (NACE), as the oldest and largest catering association in the world, formally coined a new term \u22catering and events\u22 to describe the profession in recognition of the trends in the field.
This combination of catering and events, and in particular, the required knowledge, skills and abilities, has not been widely and systematically studied. A detailed study can conclusively provide professionals with stronger, scientifically oriented bases for making generic decisions that affect developing training programs, selecting and rewarding managers, predicting individual job performance, planning professional development and staff empowerment.
The purpose of this study was to develop a competency model for catering and event professionals. Competency models identify competencies needed for professionals in order to perform effectively and efficiently in a given occupation. The resulting competency model for this study included nine competencies for catering and event professionals with sub-competencies divided into knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics