What if there was an easier way? What if we could bring up the next generation of travel distribution professionals with an accelerated education plan that helped them circumvent the traditional 25-year plan? Of course, there's nothing that can replace real-world experience, but can't we try to replicate our industry understanding in a classroom environment or through mentoring?

Too often, we graduate, leave the classroom and stop learning for good. Some, in a down economy, will return to earn new degrees or certifications. But, for the most part, we enter the real world, and so begins the long, tedious process of on-the-job training. In the first year of our professional lives we say, "I wish they had taught me this or that," but we rarely call our professors and give the suggestion a chance at life in the classroom. Instead, we share it down the road as a supervisor to the new junior employee, when that helpful tidbit becomes a bullet in a list of new items to assimilate with client demands and day-to-day headaches. The chance to turn that "wish they had" into an actual item on a curriculum is past, and yet another class of young professionals is set ...