Operations
Workarounds at play Radisson Academy. IHG Skills Academy. Hilton Apprenticeships. Visit the website of any big hotel chain and you’ll soon find a training scheme for young people. But more than the content of these programmes – Accor promises to teach ‘skills for work and life’ while IHG offers advice on everything from guest interactions to digitalisation – are the way they make students feel welcome. Wherever you look, you’ll find references to mental health and diversity and, to quote IHG’s example, “living a more balanced lifestyle”.
Nor is this focus especially hard to appreciate.
With competition from other sectors rising every day, hospitality is increasingly obliged to offer young workers much more than mere wages. The Sustainable Hospitality Alliance is at the centre of these developments too. Acting as a go-between between NGOs and hotel operators, it helps eager young professionals find the right employer. Yet beyond mere recruitment, Raza and her team seem most interested in ensuring these partnerships are actually appealing. As she explains, that could be as simple as matching youngsters to hotels near their homes. And for those apprentices who do have to travel, especially women, Raza equally advocates giving them safer day shifts. “These are small changes,” she stresses, “but a hotel team may not be aware of it.”
Decent remuneration is important here too: Raza is encouraged by developments in the UK, which recently announced plans to raise the minimum wage by nearly 10%. More to the point, there’s plenty of evidence that investing in staff early can pay off over the longer term. As research by the University of Warwick uncovered, employers were able to recoup the costs of training young people over just a couple of years. And though specific statistics for hospitality are scarce, Barratt Development, the housing giant, found that by promoting from within the company could save £4,000 in recruitment costs. Raza, for her part, sees tangible benefits in focusing on the young as well. “Young people are quicker in picking up technology,” she argues, adding that when it comes to issues like sustainability, they’re more likely to bring passion to the fight than their older colleagues too.
Jobs for life?
There are challenges here. As an organisation particularly focused on bringing displaced and other vulnerable people into the hospitality fold, Raza says that the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance can struggle to make candidates presentable at first glance. Once again, that requires thoughtful partnerships with hotel chains, helping them grasp that the “presentation skills” and “communication skills” of, for instance, a
Hotel Management International /
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young Ukrainian refugee, may need fine-tuning. To be fair, there are signs operators themselves understand this. IHG, for its part, now offers online training courses in a range of languages, including Arabic, Spanish, Thai – and Ukrainian.
At the same time, there’s plenty of reasons to imagine that demand for such gateways into the world of hospitality are only going to increase. A full 70% of people in sub-Saharan Africa are under the age of 30, and with the populations of western countries ageing fast, the need of hotels to secure eager young workers is only going to rise. Not that new recruits are necessarily destined to remain with a single boss forever. For if robust professional partnerships can clearly help employers and workers alike – Hilton is one of the many chains to offer generous sabbatical and retirement schemes – Raza is equally conscious that the old cliché of jobs for life no longer applies. Fortunately, she stresses, the skills you learn in hospitality are “very transferable” elsewhere, something that’s clearly true from people management to digital. Given how changeable modern employment seems anyway, such flexibility can only help. ●
Above and below: Organisations like the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance help eager young professionals find the right employer.
Phovoir; Monkey Business Images/
Shutterstock.com
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