Bits & bytes
Forum for hospitality professionals

Addressing a long required need of the hospitality industry, a forum for hospitality HR professionals, training managers and hospitality educators, the Hospitality Educators and Recruiters Association (HERA), was launched in Chennai recently.

The Association would seek to update the industrial technology and advancements with hospitality institutions, share the best HR practices,organise training needs for the hospitality educators and students, apart from various other activities.

One of the main objectives of HERA would be to address the attrition rates in the industry, Vikram Cotah, General Manager, Radisson GRT Hotel, said at a gathering of hospitality industry professionals.

"There will be an estimated shortage of about 11,400 people in Chennai in star hotels alone for the year 2007-08 and this will be double the number in the whole of Tamil Nadu," he said, adding the reason for this was almost 30 per cent of those who entered the industry moved over to areas like IT, airlines and others. — PTI

The University Grants Commission (UGC) recently set up a five-member committee to formulate guidelines for the newly announced fellowship programme for central varsities. The Committee, headed by B.B. Bhattacharya, Vice-Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, will submit its report within 10 days to the UGC Chairman. "The committee will finalise the guidelines for instituting scholarships in central universities for students pursuing M.Phil and Ph.D.," UGC Chairman Sukhadeo Thorat said in New Delhi recently. The five-member panel will also decide the number of scholarships and the amount of money to be given under the programme, he said. The fellowship amount would be provided under a development grant, which would be placed at the disposal of vice-chancellors of central universities. As a part of the expansion of fellowship programme, the UGC has decided to institute at least 3,000 fellowships for Ph.D students pursuing studies at state universities. — PTI

Online job portal naukri.com forged an alliance with US-based online job site CareerBuilder.com, which will provide job seekers in both the countries instant access to new employment opportunities. The US-based job site has over 23 million unique visitors with about 1.5 million jobs vacancies while naukri.com has a database of more than 6.5 million registered users with job postings from over 20,000 corporations and 180 million page views per month, according to a company release. — PTI