Careers in pub management: Springboard Careers Festival

With Springboard UK's annual Hospitality Careers Festival just around the corner, Phil Mellows takes a look at this year's offering.

Your Springboard to success​

Springboard UK's week-long Hospitality Careers Festival at the end of March should be a great opportunity for the pub industry to raise its profile among job seekers, especially school leavers.

It is the week when the hospitality, travel and tourism industries open their doors to fresh talent and get the chance to show, first hand, the exciting opportunties that are available.

But will the pub industry be throwing its weight behind the event? This is the fourth year Springboard has organised a festival, yet pubs have been largely marginal to the activities.

This year's event was launched in lively fashion before 250 top-ranking industry professionals at London's Globe Theatre at the end of last year, but while hotel and restaurant chains were queuing up to take part, pub operators have been slow to come forward with their ideas about how they are going to contribute.

On the positive side, the festival chair this year is Angie Risley, HR director of pub-restaurant operator Whitbread, and tenanted pub giant Pubmaster is sponsoring the website. But up to last week the festival office had no more to report.

"We would certainly like to get more pub companies involved," said Georgia Saxon. "There is a need to galvanise the industry into taking part."

Some of the set-piece events planned for this year's festival would certainly seem to fit.

A major chain or maybe a regional brewer could, for instance, organise a tour of town centre outlets for potential recruits among students or even schoolchildren to show them what goes on behind the scenes and inspire them to think of pubs as a possible career.

Even individual licensees could think about contacting a local school to arrange a visit - Springboard is mailing schools this week to warn them about what is going on so they should be receptive.

You have to be careful about what you do in the bar area, but there is plenty of scope for activity in the kitchen as Greene King's Appleton's chain demonstrates (see pictures).

With or without the pub industry, Anne Walker, managing director of Springboard, predicted that this year's careers festival would be "absolutely massive" with the target of gaining £3m-worth of positive publicity.

"It is about attracting people, changing their perceptions and raising the profile of the industry - and the most powerful tool to do that is work experience," she said. "It is the single most important factor in determining career choice.

"That's why we want thousands of companies to throw open their doors and give people a positive experience of the industry."

The 2003 event is not only aimed at young people. Springboard is also keen to target disabled people, the long-term unemployed, career changers, those returning to a working life and anyone who can influence them.

As Angie Risley put it at the launch, "this is a celebration of the industry as a great place to work. In our business it's the people that matter. They are the ones who can deliver a great experience to our customers.

"Let's grab this opportunity. In the course of the week we can reach 100,000 people and talk to them about the positives."

Recruitment continues to be an urgent priority across the hospitality sector. It is estimated that it needs to take on 700,000 new people a year - a fifth of the new jobs created in the UK.

At the same time there are two million fewer young people coming on to the jobs market than there were 15 years ago, causing the industry to look increasingly to overseas countries for recruits.

"It means we have to work even harder to create those great places to work," said Angie.

Pictured: John Hellins Primary School pupils were given a cookery demonstration at the Old Talbot, near Milton Keynes.​

Festival diary: Monday March 31 - Sunday April 6​

• Monday - VIP launch events and skills challenge​
  Launch events, highlighting the week's activities will take place all over the country, with the London launch sponsored by Whitbread. During the afternoon the fun gets started with skills challenges inviting an unsuspecting audience of 14 to 16-year-olds to try their hand at a range of jobs.

Tuesday - Buddy Day​
Work experience is key to choosing a career in hospitality and Buddy Day, sponsored by food wholesaler 3663, involves taking a mother, father, teacher, neighbour or friend into work for a day and letting them see for themselves what goes on behind the scenes. Springboard plans to include celebrities and industry figures in the job-shadowing. Licensing minister Dr Kim Howells has agreed to take part.

Wednesday - Springboard UK Awards​
The inaugural Springboard UK Awards, sponsored by hotel chain Le Meridien, will celebrate excellence in attracting people to hospitality careers and raising the profile of the industry as a whole.

Thursday - careers fairs, parents' evenings and food service management​
Currently sponsored by the British Hospitality Association (BHA), careers and jobs fairs are being staged throughout the country to offer advice to potential recruits and match candidates with job places. Parents' evenings will see the industry open its doors to the parents of future employees and show off the wide range of opportunities available.
A London event, What is Food Service Management?, will show college students, teachers and lecturers possible career options and offer a selection of genuine job opportunities.

Friday - Discovery Day treasure hunts​
Potential recruits will get the chance to find out what really goes on inside the industry with a treasure hunt taking them around selected locations throughout the UK.

Saturday and Sunday - take over a business​
The festival concludes with groups of job-seeking students working in businesses for a weekend.

Greene King educates the young​

You are never too young to learn about a career in the pub industry - as the pupils from John Hellins Primary School discovered last month.

They were invited along to the opening of Greene King's new Appleton's pub-restaurant concept at the Old Talbot near Milton Keynes where they planted seeds in the chef's herb garden and were treated to a cookery demonstration - as well a slice of the brand's signature apple pie.

The school visits, Greene King believes, educate young children about the importance of eating fresh food and introduce the children and their parents to the new local pub, as well as giving them an early taste of a hospitality career.

The activity has also been run at the Appleton's at Welland Lodge in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, and the Appleton's at the Old Beams in Ibsley, Hampshire.

Hall & Woodhouse sets Gold standard​

The benefits of e-learning as a tool, not only to train but to recruit and retain staff were cited by Dorset brewer Hall & Woodhouse as it presented the first Gold Awards in its new Hallmark training scheme.

The scheme spans basic health and hygiene training for new barstaff at bronze level right up to the pub manager training, which earns gold.

Courses are designed with e-learning firm Creative Learning Media and, although they assume no industry knowledge, their modular structure allows experienced people to skip sections.

Licensee Paula Tennyson, who manages the Hankridge Arms in Taunton, Somerset, piloted the scheme. She says it has had a positive effect on recruitment and retention at the