The Impact of Digital Space Development on Students in Tourism and Digital Media

The post-pandemic tourism phenomenon and labor market accelerated the digital work demand allowing students from Generation Z to enter the labor market earlier. The digital system's fast pace creates pressure on future employees, the most susceptive being the students already working for online reservation platforms and digital media as a natural continuity of the FoMO phenomenon. In order to increase their competitiveness, students from digital professions work during their classes in the digital workspace. This paper presents preliminary data from an experimental study exploring the rapport between multitasking, text comprehension and retention, and burnout in students freelancing and working part-time in digital tourism, online booking platforms, and digital media. When students multitasked between reading professional news and a professor`s lecture, the average value of the level of information retention, the logic coherence of text retained, and the overall level of text comprehension and retention was lower. The decrease in overall comprehension task was greater for tourism students in the case of professional news, but they performed better in the case of the lecture compared with students in digital media. This study offers arguments in favor of organizing the activity in the online system and balancing the study time and work time during the student period.