John Christopher Mesana | John Elmer Lacson | Meiselle Camacho | Marcus Gabriel Rodriguez | Bernadette Virata | Eduardo Garcia | Jian Marcus Manalo | Frincess Venice Dela Paz | John Andrei Santos |
July 28, 2022
During the COVID-19 health crisis, economic downturns have been observed in the different parts of the world. Retrenchments brought by this economic crisis gained the attention of researchers, especially on the workers’ second career choices after losing employment. However, second career investigations in hospitality industry remains a research imperative to date. To contribute to the literature on hospitality workers’ second career phenomenon, this manifest content analysis (MCA) study was conducted to examine web contents, such as online news articles and YouTube videos featuring second career choices of furloughed hospitality industry employees during the pandemic. Using the search words “COVID-19”, “hotels”, “restaurants”, and “second career”, a total of 70 articles and videos were identified with their different stories using the surface details descriptively analyzed. Findings revealed that most featured workers in the hospitality industry are from North America (75.71%), male (60.61%), those who had their first career experience in restaurant industry (94.29%), in which most of them were in North America (41.57%), and those who had chosen their second career in business and management (42.86%). The study’s limitation to online news articles and YouTube videos, and recommendation for further studies were also discussed, including its implication to the second career phenomenon studies. Implications of the study’s findings, limitations and recommendations were also discussed.