There’s no doubt the opening of the trans-Tasman travel bubble in April was the best news hospitality businesses have had for 12 months.
Even before it happened, we knew it would be no silver bullet, and that there would be peaks and troughs as the initial surge of people rushing to connect with family slowly turned into business travellers and Australian visitors, and the effects spread across the country.
So it has proved. Some areas are reaping immediate benefits, though not yet large, while others may have to wait a little longer.
But it’s also something of a double-edged sword for the hospitality industry, which is now faced with having to find staff to replace many of the several thousand seasonal migrant workers and people on working holidays who have been shut out by our closed borders. It was they who have brought much-needed skills to our bars, cafes, restaurants and accommodation providers that the industry couldn’t fill with Kiwis.
But it’s not just while the borders remain closed to all but Australians. There are strong indications from the Government that even when our borders open to other countries, the industry won’t have the same access to migrants it’s had in the past.
The industry absolutely agrees with hiring more Kiwis, but the problem has always been finding the right mix of quality and quantity in a population spread over a country the size of Britain.
But we’re up for the challenge and I know the Government is. It was clear to me after a recent meeting with Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi that he’s empathetic to the challenges we’re facing and realises a two-tier approach is needed.
Training and providing a pathway is the key, but it won’t happen overnight, and we’re going to need help from the Government as we navigate the ebbs and flows to come. We’ll need help with things such as reviewing compliance costs and legislation and, yes, we will need a reasonable inflow of migrants in the medium term.
Asking the industry to train and employ more Kiwis while asking it to cope with a higher minimum wage (and its flow-on) without support, won’t work.
That’s what the Government can do, what about the industry?
Well, right now we’re going full-bore on a training programme we believe will make a real impact.
Our industry is staffed by many talented and dedicated professionals who have long provided on-the-job training that hasn’t been captured to add value to those who have chosen it as a career and also for those who transit through our industry by adding and upskilling soft skills.
There are others who have fallen through the cracks during their education journey, including lacking even basic numeracy and literacy skills. We have and will continue to find a place for them in our industry with proper ongoing training and a career pathway. This has been a problem since before COVID, but the border closures laid it bare.
A hospitality passport is what this programme designed to tackle. It’s in the final stages of development and won’t be launched for a month or two yet, but I can give an overview of it.
It’s an online tool that will offer employees courses on hundreds of pieces of content across a range of categories – beverage, culinary, service, housekeeping, business, management, compliance and COVID.
What I really love about it is it’s industry expert-led, and businesses can create their own content wherever they are in New Zealand. That also means they don’t need to have an employee showing a newbie the ropes because that’s part of the module they’ve chosen.
Other benefits include:
- first-timers can learn fundamentals in an instant, with courses no longer than 1 hour
- employees have access to their own learning passport which highlights skills learnt to be shared throughout their learning and career
- staff can watch training on any device, anytime
- the first year will be free for Hospitality NZ members
I’m very excited about this programme, which is all about future-focusing the industry to create better businesses with better staff. Watch this space.