People: Putting People 1st

Phil Mellows talks to Simon Turl, the man heading the hospitality industry's new sector skills council.

Schools no longer teach the subject formerly known as domestic science. No doubt this is a relief to millions of parents faced with finding a slot on the family menu for dubious-looking fudge and rock cakes that seem to resemble their namesake, but what about the hospitality industry?

Pubs, along with restaurants and hotels, face a growing problem in the lack of talented young people who are looking for and establishing a career in hospitality, a problem sharpened by the development of food in pubs and increasingly demanding customers.

Despite the rise of the celebrity chef there are simply not enough youngsters coming through. Even those who start a career tend not to stick with it.

This is one of the central challenges of the industry's new sector skills council, launched in May under the name "People 1st". Chief executive officer Simon Turl, who has steered the organisation through early months during which it won government recognition as the voice representing employers across the sector, is acutely aware that something is amiss.

Quality training​

"We have been doing a lot of research and have found, for instance, there is a 75 per cent drop-out rate among modern apprentices in the sector," he says. "It's obviously a huge problem."

Part of this comes down to employers being funded to sign up modern apprentices but not to see them through what can be a demanding couple of years. He also believes the National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ) around which apprenticeships are built need to be reviewed.

"The problem with the NVQ is that it's either pass or fail," he explains. "There are no grades for people who don't quite make it."

Simon also believes employers need to get back to rewarding staff in pay according to the training they complete and the qualifications they gain.

"When I came into the industry it was worth putting in more effort to acquire skills - there was an incentive," he says. "A lot of employers blame the minimum wage for not being able to continue to do that, but the fact is we removed pay incentives before the minimum wage came in. We seem to want to get rid of people before they get to a higher pay grade."

Money is a major issue in another sense. Hospitality courses are expensive to run. So expensive that over the last few years a lot of courses have closed. Astonishingly, at least 30 per cent of students who do come through the chef NVQ won't have touched meat because the colleges can't afford it.

"No wonder they don't know how to cook," Simon says. "Kids aren't experiencing good, freshly cooked food at home. When are they supposed to develop an interest in food?"

And those celebrity chefs? "Television is not the best advertisement for us," he adds, grimly. "We must find ways to get people interested in hospitality or the problem will get progressively worse. We have to get the teachers into catering environments, they don't realise how much fun it can be."

Attracting newcomers​

In spite of all this, Simon is optimistic about the potential of the industry to attract quality people.

"There is a lot of talk these days about work-life balance - enjoying your work is part of that and that's what we have to offer.

"I don't want to paint too black a picture. There are youngsters coming into the industry, but good employers are having to bridge a gap in their education, even at key skills level - for example, how to serve people. Training people at that basic level is taking all the training budget," he explains.

"I'm not blaming education. The blame is with the industry for not being clear about what we want - and that's what we're trying to do at People 1st - making sure education delivers what we want."

Over the summer People 1st has been working with employers, the British Beer & Pub Association and the British Institute of Innkeeping among others to establish a new set of National Occupational Standards (NOC) for the industry.

These list the skills on which all officially recognised qualifications are based, and therefore determine the education and training that people get.

New challenges​

The trouble is, the people who will be trained according to the new NOCs won't complete their training for another two or three years, when the industry will undoubtedly have thrown up a whole new series of challenges.

"We are already in a situation where the number of chefs being produced has not caught up with the growth in eating out," says Simon. "NOCs are almost always out of date so we have to forecast better.

"Demand for good chefs is increasing. Every time a new restaurant opens or a pub starts offering food it has to be staffed. But the education process is lagging behind."

The new NOCs, for instance, will have to take into account the new licensing laws and the steadily rising expectations of customers who go out to the pub. Customers like Simon Turl who doesn't go into his local any more because it doesn't provide the "welcoming experience" he expects.

"Pubs have improved a lot over the last 10 or 15 years, but it's a fast-moving environment and they tend to rely too much on the local catchment area," he says. "The quality of your employees will make people go further for a better experience. Décor is part of that but it's great people that do it for me.

"We're a service industry and we should be talking about how we train our staff better in order to attract customers, we should be using it as a USP."

The aim of People 1st is to persuade the educational establishment to fund training in the basic skills hospitality requires so that employers can go on to invest in people from a higher base, raising standards across the industry.

It's a challenge Simon feels needs new blood. He goes back to his company, catering giant Compass, in November, and the sector skills council is in the process of recruiting a new CEO to take over. Not particularly old himself, he believes it's a job for a younger man. "I'll still be around," Simon states. "I don't want to walk away from this one, but we need someone with energy and fresh ideas to drive it forwards."

People 1st​

People 1st, the new sector skills council for the hospitality, leisure, travel and tourism industries, was launched in May and replaces the industry's national training organisation, the Hospitality Training Foundation.

Chaired by John Brackenbury, the former chairman of pub group Pubmaster, it is charged with the task of uniting employers across 14 industry sectors in a strategy to raise skills levels in the sector, and communicating their needs to government and the Learning & Skills Councils.

Its first chief executive officer, Simon Turl, who used to work for Whitbread, is on secondment from his current employer, contract catering group Compass.