TRAINING DAY

Lack of training and career advancement is one reason why employees leave, also backed up by the TFG report. This year just under 60% (56.52%) of our survey respondents said their company has offered training opportunities in the last 12 months, but a similar number (56.09%) said they were not given any direction as to their career development with the company.

Arora commented: “Offering training to better associates knowledge and skills doesn’t necessarily mean a guaranteed career growth. Trainings and coaching are conducted for three purposes, one to close a gap in their current performance, second to bring about consistency, and last to ensure that organisations are planning for their succession plan. We as hotel GMs need to ensure that we invest in star associates and have plans to retain them by a succession plan. Alternatively we need to constantly seek to have quality personnel lined up to fill this attrition. In coming years, Dubai as a destination will need hundreds and thousands of quality personnel. That is why DTCM has announced a hospitality school to address this need.”

What Arora is referring to is the Dubai College of Tourism (DCT), which is an institution dedicated to training the next generation of tourism professionals and providing school leavers with an alternative option for further education, that bridges the gap between in-house training and a full bachelor’s degree. The government-backed vocational college will be accepting its first batch of students in September 2017. In addition, the college will also serve as the base to develop and roll out training and industry on-boarding programmes that encourage young UAE nationals to be part of the city’s evolving tourism sector. The practical and flexible vocational courses are focused around five core faculties — tourism, events, hospitality, retail and culinary arts.

Focusing on youth and their interest in hospitality is something that Hilton president and CEO Christopher Nassetta also highlighted at the Arabian Hotel Investment Conference (AHIC) 2017, where he said that if the hospitality industry ignores youth issues including unemployment, it does so at its own peril.

In conversation with Bench Events chairman Jonathan Worsley, Nassetta said that one of the things the hospitality industry needed to do was market itself better to the new wave of job-seekers, and said that in many cases, the youth are “not thinking about our jobs, and in many cases they think it’s a bad job”. “If you look at the numbers WTTC has put out, for the next 20 years we are going to generate 75 million new jobs in travel and tourism,” he said, sharing the opportunities of the industry.

However, The First Group report has revealed that while there are many opportunities in the sector, there is a shortage of skilled workforce. The report revealed that Expo 2020 Dubai is likely to generate around 110,000 new jobs in the travel and tourism sector; however, it was imperative to get the right people for these jobs.

Assila Hotel, Jeddah general manager Harry Fernandes told Hotelier Middle East that investing in people from the beginning is very important for retention, along with continuous training.

He said: “We have a very strong training culture in the company. We have something called ‘Future Leaders’ which I am bringing in to Jeddah. It’s a module-based training programme for young managers to learn the things that you’re normally not taught when you start in hospitality. We are bringing this programme for our teams, both at management level and supervisory level.”

Fernandes added that training is very important, especially when opening a new hotel. Not just hospitality training, Fernandes has been keen on building team spirit as a method of generating loyalty by creating sports teams for basketball, football and cricket. He added: “Out on a sport field, people express themselves quite differently and that gels them together.”

GREEN MATTER

While salary is definitely not everything, a quarter of our respondents said they have never received a pay rise. In a market with rising cost of living, it’s imperative that team members are compensated for their work fairly, so that they can have a good quality standard of living.

At the advisory panel for the GM Gebate 2017, the issue of quality of living and salaries came up, and Laurent A. Voivenel, senior VP, operations & development Middle East, Swiss-Belhotel International said: “Our industry is a people business. We know that without the labour force, we are nothing. The problem is that when you look at the balance sheet, the payroll is on the liability, not on the asset.” He added: “How can we give better treatment, better retention, and drop the turnover that we have in our properties? Not every single operator has the same problem; you have some good operators with low turnover. But if you look at Dubai, 10 years ago turnover was 12%, today it’s 28%.”

Palazzo Versace GM Sandra Tikal added that new F&B outlets are the ones poaching “all the F&B staff for more money”. “It is actually restaurants and bars that are hurting our turnover,” she added.

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