Food and Tourism, October 16, 2023

Food and Beverage Service teacher Frédéric Gé is the guest for this episode of the Voc Talk Café. The discussion will focus on ways to align school training with workforce needs and how society’s perception of this trade impacts student recruitment and motivation.
As a society, we enjoy eating out and having a dining experience and the front of the house staff is an integral part of this. We recognise the need for servers and maitre d’s and we know the transferability of their people, management and sales skills, but as a collective we have a hard time seeing past the perception that being a server is not a legitimate trade, it is something you do « while you are waiting for something else. » We explored some of the difficulties in recruiting students for the program, and some of the innovative program offers centres have tried to increase student inscription. The discussion revolved around programs of study in other parts of the world that combine cooking and F&B, the workforce resolution to have a work-life balance that is very hard to do in the restaurant world, and how the front of the hours curates and creates and experience for the diner. The cultural and social aspect of dining and relaxing is an integral part of who we are as humans, and the desire for this continues to grow even as the workforce struggles to find workers. We finished our discussion with a look at a pilot project with an industry partner and RAC to assess workers and support their missing skills with on-the-job training. This situation could be an interesting asynchronous learning project, lending itself to project funding through a TechnoFAD mesure.

This meeting was on October 16, 2023. It was hosted by Robin Long, Provincial Vocational Training Education Consultant and Marc Vézina, Education Consultant, RÉCIT-Vocational Training, English School Boards.