By Angela Green, Content Executive: Choose Hospitality calls to promote hospitality and catering to school children.
An industry alliance is asking for hospitality and catering ambassadors to step forward and promote our industry to young people. Through the ‘Choose Hospitality Pledge’ a growing number of hospitality and catering industry organisations have already mobilised including Choose Hospitality, CareerScope, and Springboard.
Partners were brought together by Nestlé Professional following its research revealing that young people have negative perceptions our industry.
To address this, the alliance is mobilising a team of hospitality and catering ambassadors, tasked with visiting secondary schools across the UK to give young people an inspiring and comprehensive picture of the hospitality and catering industry.
More than 40% of hospitality and catering businesses now face people and skills shortages that over the next 5 years is expected to get worse. To understand why the hospitality and catering industry is finding it particularly hard to recruit talent, Nestlé Professional commissioned MMR Research to speak to young jobseekers across the UK.
The research revealed that, although some young job seekers are interested in the industry, many view it as a ‘back-up career’, associated with long hours and hard work. These negative perceptions are fuelled by insufficient information and a lack of ambassadors they can relate to. When it comes to advice, more than 1 in 4 young people ask people already working in the industry, valuing their advice over that of their teacher or careers advisers. Fortunately, 62% of the young people working in hospitality and catering say they love their role, indicating an untapped pool of potential ambassadors.
To address this, Nestlé Professional has convened the ‘Choose Hospitality Pledge’, encouraging hospitality and catering businesses and people in the industry put themselves forward as industry ambassadors.
Claire Bosi, Editor, Chef Publishing and founder of Choose Hospitality said: “The UK’s hospitality and catering sector is incredibly diverse and varied, making it one of the most exciting sectors to work in. Despite this, there’s still very low awareness around the roles available to young people, and the potential for them to progress fast.
“Our hard-hitting team of ambassadors at Choose Hospitality do a fantastic job, inspiring young jobseekers to consider a career in the sector.
“We’re looking forward to working with others in the alliance, taking inspiring ambassador out to schools, so they can start working their magic even earlier.”
To sign up as an ambassador, businesses and individuals can do so here.