Starter Kit. Idea 321 of 500. Cluster 16
Employer-owned technical colleges: the hotels train the chefs, the port trains the planners
The mechanism, from the book
177,000 qualify every year and 45,000 get a place. The other 130,000 are a market that nobody has built for, and the polytechnic is not a second choice when it leads to a job.
The first step
Ask the general managers of five hotels in one town how many trained cooks they hire a year, how many leave within the year, and what each costs to find and train. Then propose a shared kitchen school, owned by the hotels, with each paying per trainee place. A letter from two hotels committing to fund places is the proof.
- Who pays first
- A hotel that loses trained staff and pays to recruit again, which would rather fund places in a school it controls.
- What leaves today
- Of the 177,000 who qualify each year most get no place, while employers still cannot find the trained staff they need.
Ask first
- Tertiary and Vocational Education Commission. Ask how a college owned by employers can have its courses accredited.
- the area Medical Officer of Health. Ask what a training kitchen must meet before students cook food that is served.
Check before you spend
Whether the college must be registered to issue certificates, what the hotels commit in writing per place, and food safety approval for the training kitchen.
Find out these three numbers
- How many trained cooks does each hotel hire in a year?
- What does each hotel spend finding and training one cook?
- What would each hotel pay per trainee place?
A comparison from the book
The second lock on the gate. Chapter One
"the country needs radiographers, logistics planners, welders,"
The jobs are already named; let the employers who need them pay to train the people.
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.