During the general election I noticed the parties all made various promises about the country’s education system. These detailed how they would support it but none of them (including the Conservatives who now form the government) mentioned the training needs of those either starting or developing their careers.
This is particularly important because as one of the country’s biggest employers, with over 2m hospitality staff, it's in particular danger. The sector is losing out in the provision of practical cookery college training which is threatened by the current cutbacks in further education funding and the approach to apprenticeships.
Adult education is crucial to the hospitality industry and it’s an issue that needs to be addressed urgently.
If there is one crucial area that can ensure your hospitality business thrives, it’s your staff. Critical to this is recruiting and retaining the right staff with the right knowledge and skill sets. That means it’s vital that as an employer, you invest in the right training to develop your team members.
Consider this, it’s your employees (either out front or in the kitchen) who create the customer experience. People have to use ingenuity to drive development and growth in any organisation. That’s where training comes in as it can really add value to your business by unlocking the potential of your employees.
For staff based in the kitchen it’s about using their newly developed skills to be innovative in creating new dishes. Rather than just purchasing meats, for example, and cooking them in the time honoured manner, training can help your chef change the emphasis to interesting and unusual cuts. By doing that they are helping you re-engineer the menu. It’s that kind of attention to detail and changes in methods of cooking that can drive your brand forward and improve sales.
It also demonstrates why there’s nothing more important than retaining your existing staff and improving their skill set. Businesses that succeed tend to have a very low turnover of people. That means you see the same staff and faces at the hotel or restaurant you’re visiting.
There are many youngsters who are looking for jobs in hospitality – and with the industry’s expansion, there’s a growing number of jobs becoming available. In the past many of these roles were filled by cheap migrant workers who possessed the necessary skills. That approach is all well and good but even migrant labour eventually needs training and upskilling.
The problem is the availability of practical college tuition to teach cookery and other basic skills is becoming increasingly limited. Furthermore few people outside the college system realise how perilous the situation is. Employers are relying on a steady – and ever larger - stream of young recruits to fill the jobs now being created by an expanding industry. Yet the places for teaching the necessary practical cookery skills are being dramatically reduced by colleges.
The reason is not because college heads want to cut back on cookery demonstrations and practical work, but because they cannot afford to provide the right facilities, the right ingredients and, increasingly, the right staff to teach students the skills they need to make a success of their career.
With the huge growth in the number of university and degree courses, further education is becoming the poor relation. That’s in spite of the current government’s commitment to increase the number of apprentices. Faced with a lack of funds and a growing demand for places (if apprenticeship is to work properly), colleges are making their training increasingly theoretical while the practical element is being placed, more and more, onto the shoulders of employers.
While some of the larger corporate companies are big enough to provide the practical element on the job or even in a teaching environment, and so drive up the number of apprentices, the many smaller, independent employers just don’t have the know-how, or the facilities to undertake what’s needed.
The result is a workforce that is not properly trained. This has severe implications for productivity and growth. It also leads to an increase in the level of poaching from those employers who do train.
The hospitality trade can’t afford to stand by helplessly. A successful campaign to increase funding for practical college training, rather than the current VAT cut, would yield far greater rewards.
If you haven’t engaged in training staff then you may be wondering where to start. Thankfully there are various colleges that offer courses in a variety of areas. Westminster Kingsway College is one example in London while Oxford Brookes School of Hospitality Management is another in Oxfordshire. The good news is many of their courses operate in conjunction with your workplace, offering a day a week to a day a month depending on what you require.
Colleges encourage collaboration with business owners to help develop trainees and employees with the skills required in the modern workplace. Popular courses have tended to be in chef service and junior management programmes; however, many have developed offerings in areas including molecular science, sustainability, waste and energy management, and procurement.
Training providers such as HIT (Hospitality Industry Training) can help you not only find the right courses and colleges based on your needs, but also will advise you as to the government schemes that may assist in reducing the cost.
Something to bear in mind is that apprenticeship have been extended to all ages. A lot of further education can now be classified as apprenticeship training which means you can receive government funding across many different areas.
There’s a variety of programmes out there for adults and young people who want to gain a qualification and recognition through their employer. Almost any training, provided it is done in a structured way that leads to something, can be classified as an apprenticeship. The government do change the rules regularly but this generally remains the case.
Consult a training provider to help you negotiate the red tape and remember, whilst the financial burden is reduced there is still a time and mentoring cost to this.
The content of this post is up to date and relevant as at 18/06/2016.
Please be aware that information provided by this blog is subject to regular legal and regulatory change. We recommend that you do not take any information held within our website or guides (eBooks) as a definitive guide to the law on the relevant matter being discussed. We suggest your course of action should be to seek legal or professional advice where necessary rather than relying on the content supplied by the author(s) of this blog.
leave a comment -