It is important that education and training programmes align with the needs of the professions they are designed to support. The culinary arts and hospitality industry is a vocational area that needs to be examined more closely to ensure that the skills and competencies taught are those that will actually be needed when students matriculate from career preparation programmes. This study compared the self-assessed leadership roles and managerial competencies of hospitality students and hospitality management professionals in employment. Using the Competing Values Framework (CVF) as a theoretical framework, eight leadership roles and 24 managerial competencies were examined in an effort to identify similarities and differences between the two groups. The authors found limited significant differences between the perceptions of the two groups; overall, the ranking of leadership roles and managerial competencies by the two populations were very similar. Implications for academic culinary arts and hospitality programmes are also presented, together with recommendations for future inquiry. (Contains 1 note, 1 table, and 2 figures.)