Industry Skills and Workforce Development STEPHEN LONG Industry Skills and Workforce Development Manager
Current Issues
Building new Employment Sources – Hospitality Awareness I wrote in the last magazine about one of the major outcomes for the THA Workforce Plan being the re-engagement of the industry with employment services. These employment services have a huge client list and should be a major source of employees for the Hospitality Industry. An untapped and unused workforce with employment agencies that must be made available - and attractive to venues for employment, the industry needs to be demystified, and the industry needs to accept a new employment dynamic using employment type agencies. I promised: BE READY IN OCTOBER – WE WILL BE MARKETING EMPLOYEES TO YOU. Well call me optimistic but things haven’t gone completely to plan. The program is being finalised with the final session on 26th September, much later than anticipated. There are various reasons for this, frustrating for all concerned but we were fairly optimistic with our timelines. We are now in planning and review time and working with TasTAFE to get training done. What have we learned? • It is very difficult to get people to sessions where there is apparently no penalty for non-attendance. • Being quite specific about requirements give agencies a get out of jail quickly pass. Agencies are generally very busy and asking an agency member to make sure they have 10 attendees attend every session proved unachievable. What happens next: • Continuing to negotiate with TasTAFE for training options • Getting feedback from agencies and Commonwealth Department of Employment • Doing review and assessment of what needs to be done if this is to continue. By the time you read this all, these things will be done – by then we will have training options done and be starting to feed new employees out to the industry, hopefully in time for some positive outcomes. We have put on 3 new contractors, Marina Oakley in the South, Jo Waldron in the North and Sharon Roland is coming on board in Devonport. Brett Geeves continues to work well in the South and Outside the Square Solutions are managing the North West and some other parts of the state. Importantly, we have made some changes to the program to make sure we get more information, even if a venue doesn’t want to participate. We are following up on all venues regardless of where they have participated and pushing out our “Seal of Approval” based on whatever information we have, be it Social Media only, Social Media + Diagnostic or the full program. Each venue is judged as appropriately being recognised for their Great Customer Service based on the information we have at hand. One of the things we have learnt is that it is difficult to get into many of your venues because of the seasonal shifts in workload and staffing changes so we are adapting the program as we go to try and support you all as much as we can without being too much of a burden, so if we come back to you a few times understand our intent is to help, If you only need some basic training assistance let us know – we are happy to provide out Typsy based options at your venue for free. If we come to your venue please consider your involvement – at the least allow us to get some diagnostic information – this information forms part of a huge survey of industry issues that uses real data from real venues of all shapes, sizes, types and locations. We have already collected some important information, for example if we ask the customers (through our Social Media analysis) what the most important considerations for them are, we find the most important is not service or skills, it’s the whole venue experience. In our analysis whether we look by business size, by region or overall, this is the major like or dislike factor – important information and we are collecting much more. Great Customer Experience Program We continue to get some really important engagement with the program.
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enquiries@tha.asn.au 03 6220 7300
Hospitality Review
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