This Program Leads Hospitality Education in BC

B.C.’s tourism sector generated $23 billion in revenue in 2024, contributing nearly $8 billion to provincial GDP and supporting close to 163,000 full-time jobs, according to the province’s tourism research data. It’s growing faster than forestry, agriculture, and oil and gas.

But the industry’s hardest gap to fill isn’t at the front desk. It's in management: operations, finance, marketing and event co-ordination.

Western Community College’s bachelor of hospitality management, or BHM, was built to close that gap. It does the job in 2.5 years rather than the traditional four, without cutting the parts of the degree that make graduates ready to hire.

Most people hear hospitality and think of restaurants and front desks, says Pranav Malotraa, Western Community College’s marketing manager.

“What they don’t realize is that behind every successful hotel, event or food service operation is someone managing budgets, leading teams and making strategic decisions.”

The course timeline won’t leave students hanging

The 2.5-year structure isn't just about speed; it also reflects how the program sequences its coursework.

Financial management, marketing strategy, hospitality operations and leadership are woven together across condensed, back-to-back terms rather than spread out with long summer gaps, and students complete more than 550 hours of industry placements alongside their classes.

New cohorts start every few months, so students don’t wait for a September intake to begin, and graduates move into the workforce while the material — and their placement experience — is still fresh.

Career paths after graduation span hotel management, event co-ordination, food service management, hospitality consulting and facility operations.

According to Western Community College, graduates earn an average of $33 an hour, and B.C. is forecast to post the fastest hospitality industry growth rate of any province through 2031.

Faculty bring the industry into the classroom

The compressed timeline works because of who’s teaching the curriculum. Sahar Movahedi, who teaches capstone and seminar courses in the BHM program, built her career from the ground up. Starting as an international tour leader at 21, she became a hotel front desk agent, a tour operator and eventually a research department head at Isfahan University’s Academic Centre for Education, Culture and Research, where she also advised the local chamber of commerce.

She holds a PhD in tourism management, trained at Harvard and IMC University in Austria and is a certified business coach with the International Coaching Federation. Her courses lean on sustainability, design thinking and coaching methodology, and are grounded in the philosophy that students learn fastest by working through real industry challenges rather than abstractions.

That same connection between the classroom and the wider industry can be found in Western Community College’s accounting and finance faculty.

Instructor Rajesh Regmi recently travelled to Osaka, Japan, to present peer-reviewed research at one of the region’s most prestigious hospitality and tourism academic conferences.

His paper — a longitudinal analysis of Marriott International's finances during its roughly $1-billion technology overhaul — argues that a company’s “human factor readiness” is what determines whether a digital transformation strategy succeeds.

It’s a fitting parallel to what BHM students are taught throughout the program: that systems and budgets matter, but so does the leadership judgment behind them.

Students solve real problems

That classroom-to-industry connection shows up in student work, too. When a group of BHM students reached their entrepreneurship course, they didn’t set out to build a startup pitch for a grade — they set out to solve a problem they’d personally experienced.

Sukhpreet Sandhu, Sukhvir Singh, Jaspreet Singh and Navjot Singh, all newcomers to Canada, conceived 2EZ Savings, a smart barcode scanner that attaches to any fridge. It tracks grocery expiry dates and alerts users before food spoils, aiming to solve the food waste problem that costs the average Canadian household more than $1,100 a year.

The device was never manufactured, but the team built out a full business case around it: brand positioning, a customer persona, a marketing strategy and financial projections.

It’s the kind of cumulative thinking the 2.5-year structure is designed to produce.

By graduation, students have the opportunity to pull threads from multiple courses into one coherent piece of work.

Supporting the whole student

Western Community College’s commitment to students extends beyond the classroom.

The college runs a community meal program twice a week, collectively serving thousands of students across the academic year — a level of structured, recurring food support that’s rare among Canadian post-secondary institutions.

“We know that a student who is hungry cannot learn at their full potential,” says a spokesperson for the college’s student services team.

“This program exists because we believe supporting the whole student means making sure their most basic needs are met.”

The menu rotates to reflect the multicultural makeup of Western Community College’s student body, and students can preview upcoming meals through a QR code posted on campus or sign up to volunteer alongside staff.

For a BHM program built around service and hospitality, it’s a fitting reflection of the values students are being taught to carry into the industry.

Applications are open all year

With multiple intake opportunities throughout the year, prospective students don’t need to wait for a single enrolment window to start a program built around getting them into management-track careers faster.

Learn more or register on Western Community College’s website.

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