Starter Kit. Idea 159 of 500. Cluster 7
Hospitality training schools
The mechanism, from the book
The tiny business pathway. A rural woman with an exceptional product should not need photography, English copy, packaging design and a distributor before the world can find her.
The first step
Speak to the managers of five hotels and guesthouses near you about which skills their new staff lack most, and what they would pay for someone who arrived trained. Run a free 2 week pilot course for 6 young people on the top two skills. Then offer the graduates to those managers for trial shifts. A manager who hires one and asks for more is your first paying client.
- Who pays first
- A hotel or guesthouse manager who loses money training new staff and would pay for recruits who arrive ready.
- What leaves today
- Trained hospitality workers leave for jobs abroad; a school keeps the skill, and the wages it earns, working on the island.
Ask first
- Tertiary and Vocational Education Commission. Ask how a hospitality school registers and has its courses recognised.
- Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority. Ask which skills hotels say are hardest to find.
Check before you spend
That courses are registered and recognised, that trainers are qualified, and that students can do placements in real hotels.
Find out these three numbers
- What will students or hotels pay for a course?
- How many hotels would take trainees for placements?
- What does one trainer cost for a year?
A comparison from the book
Japan. Chapter Eleven
"Meiji Japan employed more than 3,000 foreign experts on fixed contracts, and as the contracts ran out, Japanese trainees took over."
Bring in skilled trainers for a fixed time and let local trainees take over.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.