On July 23rd, 2026, 45 hotel leaders, sustainability managers, social entrepreneurs and educators from across Southeast Asia gathered at the Eco-Campus of École d’Hôtellerie et de Tourisme (EHT) Paul Dubrule in Siem Reap, Cambodia, for ASSET-H&C’s annual public conference, themed “Building Green Skills for Hospitality’s Future: From Classroom to Check-in.” The morning was built around one question: how do vocational schools and the hospitality industry close the sustainability skills gap together?
The conference was co-hosted by the European Institute of Collaboration and Development (IECD) and the Association of Southeast Asian Social Enterprise for Training in Hospitality and Catering (ASSET-H&C), with the support of donors and partners such as the French Development Agency (AFD), the Exo Foundation and the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF).
Celeste Mueth Dubrule, Communication and Projects Manager at EHT Paul Dubrule, opened with the market reality: Green Key, the international eco-certification run by the Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE), has grown by 65% since 2021.
“On one side, hotels are being pushed and are pushing themselves to sustain. On the other side, someone has to train professionals who actually make that happen on the ground. The gap between the market vision and the workforce readiness is exactly where professional schools like us come in,” said Celeste.
EHT closed its own credibility gap by pursuing Green Flag certification, the same FEE standard hotels hold under Green Key, turning the school from an outside training provider into a partner inside the industry’s sustainability ecosystem.
The results are measurable: waste fell from roughly 16 kg per person in 2023 to about 4 kg in 2024 through student-run sorting, composting and gardening, and EHT placed first globally in the Cambodia Energy Efficiency Competition 2024 with 37.24% cumulative energy savings. Graduates tell the same story: of 101 alumni surveyed, close to nine in ten rated the programme very valuable and around 90% apply what they learned at work, most often to improve waste, energy and water practices, and to explain sustainability to colleagues and guests.
Take-away: A continuous two-way exchange. “Schools bringing market leads into the classroom and businesses building the structure to actually use and reward the competencies we’re producing.” Celese argued.
Everyone in the room agreed that green skills matter. The roundtable, hosted by Phan Thanh Ha, Project Manager of ASSET-H&C, began from the next question: how?
Inside the hotel. Vanna Sok, Sustainability Manager at FCC Angkor by Avani, shared that the hotel earned Green Growth 2015 certification in 2024 and a gold medal in 2025, but was candid that changing daily habits is harder than earning the certification. Her approach is personal rather than procedural: she ties sustainability to staff’s own finances, showing what a single light left on for a full shift costs on a power bill, because a personal stake is what actually shifts behaviour.
“What we have been showing our team is that: if our hotel is sustainable and our team is a role model for our customers, it really impacts the hotel reputation ourselves as well as the younger generations in the long run,” Vanna said.
The hotel also runs its own sustainability orientation and partners with schools like EHT on topics it cannot cover alone. Recruitment, though, has not caught up: it still screens for technical skills first, and candidates who already have the mindset are “not really easy” to find.
Inside the classroom. Davin Nem, Destination Eco-Talent Coordinator at EHT Paul Dubrule, described the school’s eight student-led teams running sustainability actions rather than just lessons, and the student who arrived indifferent and later became a trainer for others — proof that the programme changes attitudes, not only knowledge. EHT tracks impact through post-training surveys and four-month follow-ups. What has changed most in three years is demand: high schools that once resisted the training now ask for it.
“For now, we have created three catalogs for sustainability training: sustainability introduction for high school, and preparation training for children. They ask you for it instead of we asking them to do the training.” Davin shared.
Around the sector. From the donor’s chair, Dara Kong, Senior Intervention Hospitality Manager at SwissContact Cambodia, described sustainability shifting over the past decade from a niche interest to a baseline requirement in nearly every project. The harder work is capacity: material has to be simplified into local language and context, and someone has to train the trainers and assessors, or certification has no one able to issue or verify it.
Asked what collaboration between SwissContact, the Ministry of Tourism, and SMEs looks like in practice, he pointed to sequencing: bring the private sector, provincial tourism departments, and local communities into the room at the very start, so ownership sits with the people who carry it forward, not the donor. The Green HoKa programme, spanning 12 provinces and roughly 350 private businesses, was built on that principle. What makes it work, he argued, is incentive alignment: government has to make compliance a win rather than a burden, so the private sector sees a real reason (reputation, customer trust, eventual licensing) to adopt it rather than resist it.
“If people want to take ownership by the private sector or the government, we have to involve them from the beginning… Private sector is the key,” Dara said.
A five-year vision: Asked to look ahead, the panel converged from three angles: Davin wants graduates with a “responsible habit” — awareness that leads to action; Vanna wants graduates who can analyse and communicate real environmental impact on their community; Dara wants green skills to stop being vocational-only and become a baseline expectation for everyone.
The final hour turned the audience into the working group, led by Nguyen Lan Anh, School Operations Management Lead of La Boulangerie Française. Four groups covering energy efficiency, water conservation, food waste and waste management each identified what industry needs, what schools already do, where the gaps are, and what each side commits to improving.
Some key insights from the groups discussions:
“Whether the topic was energy, water, food, or waste, the same three fixes surfaced again and again: train the trainers, agree on what a green skill actually means, and bring government and industry into the room rather than leaving schools to solve it alone,” Lan Anh summarised.
The event concluded with a call to action, asking every participant to commit to one small action to build a sustainable workforce. Organisers emphasised that sustainability is a daily habit and that no single entity can achieve these goals alone. By fostering an ecosystem of collaboration between donors, governments, schools and the private sector, Southeast Asia can move toward a more inclusive and prosperous tourism industry, echoing the network’s slogan: “Together we go further.”
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