A recent cover feature in the Institute of Hospitality Magazine asked the question, “Are we training our graduates to work in banks or hotels?” The article highlighted that banks and high-end retailers include specialist hotel schools in their annual graduate recruitment rounds.
Dr Craig Thompson, the Academic Dean at the Stenden Hotel Management School in the Netherlands, pointed out “they take our graduates because they need service minded graduates and they can train them to act and think financially. In stark contrast, hotels don’t recognise the service-mindedness of graduates from hotel schools”.
This ‘leakage’ of very high quality service-minded graduates to other service sectors is becoming a major problem for the industry. By not recognising the talents of graduates and providing appropriate development opportunities for them, the industry is losing the business leaders of the future to these other industries where there is a clear career path and their talents are recognised.
Although it may be easy to point the finger at the industry in suggesting they don’t recognise what they have available to them, that in itself is not the whole problem. It is true that often the industry does not always value graduates and rather treats all graduates with a collective approach that says “well now you need to learn to do the job”. What this does not recognise is that many specialist hotel schools spend a great deal of time and energy educating and training their graduates to be very service-minded and to understand the nature of hospitality at the very highest level.
However, to anyone involved in hospitality education, it has become increasingly obvious that in some countries, publicly-funded hospitality education has lost its way and is not producing service-minded graduates. Hospitality education has become homogenised and almost indistinguishable from more generic business courses. It should come as no surprise that in many publicly-funded institutions, compulsory work placements are increasingly a thing of the past, and the rather quaint ideas of ‘training restaurants’ are now seen as a net cost rather than as an essential in creating the service-minded hospitality professional for the future.
It is no accident then that banks and retailers are visiting specialist hotel schools to recruit because it is in these schools that the appropriate service culture and ethos is developed from the very outset – something that is sorely missing in the more generic courses.
So what is the solution? For the industry, the solution is to devote more time in recruiting their future talent from the specialist schools and providing a distinctive career path for graduates from those schools. It is important that the industry understands the nature of the education and training that graduates are receiving, rather than making assumptions based on past experiences or hearsay. In order to develop a real understanding, those who hire need to to be more engaged with the hotel schools.
This engagement could take a number of different forms, from the simplistic ‘milk rounds’, through sitting on advisory boards, to the more complex, but ultimately much more rewarding, opportunities provided by ‘lending’ members of staff to the hotel schools for limited periods of time.
Developing such a relationship provides a wonderful triple whammy. It ensures that as a business, a hotel really does understand the training and education the hotel school provides. It allows the business to have a direct input into that education and training and, for the individuals that they ‘lend’, provides a unique professional development opportunity. That opportunity includes leadership experience in a very different setting, encouraging real outside the box thinking and engaging with the students as the leaders of the future.
This begs the question as to whether the industry would be prepared to develop this type of relationship other than by accident. If there was a willingness on the part of the industry to start this type of approach, then there would be a willingness on the part of eHotelier to try and facilitate it. Is anyone listening?
About the author
Professor P A Jones MBE is the Dean of the eHotelier Academy. With a distinguished career in hospitality, education and training, Peter has been involved with national and international projects with clients involved in hospitality education.
He recently completed the role as the Project Director for the unique multi-million pound Edge Hotel School in the UK. This is a new concept in hospitality higher education, where the degree programmes are based on ‘learning through doing’ in a fully operational country house hotel. The school and hotel were formally opened by the Duke of Kent in September 2012.
Peter is a Director the Edge Hotel School and of Hotel Future, a new education and training initiative in Greater Manchester and is a Visiting Professor at the University of Derby. He was also awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to the hospitality industry.
