Careers festival needs promotion further afield
A Festival is a feast day, a period of merrymaking, a time of special importance that might include music and theatre. It is a celebration. And a celebration is a public performance where someone or something is observed and honoured and praised and exalted. If it's a careers festival, a Springboard UK Careers Festival, it is hospitality as a profession that is observed and honoured and praised and exalted.
The Springboard Careers Festival is a week-long pageant demonstrating all that is good about working in hospitality and catering. It is about companies opening their doors and saying: "Look at this. Isn't it exciting? Come and join us."
For the most part, operators engage in this process with enthusiasm because they believe in its effect and because of the ongoing difficulty most of them have recruiting staff.
Last week, the fourth annual Careers Festival was launched in London. It was a professional event, proudly staged, and the festival was given the razzmatazz it deserved. The message was clear - get involved, do your bit and raise the profile of hospitality as a career choice among youngsters.
Doing your "bit" means putting on a show - cooking 1,000 sausages for breakfast, touring in an open-top bus, that sort of thing - displaying the best side of the business and getting the target audience to experience it. Celebrating it, in fact.
But it's more than just a show. What the public sees and what youngsters experience needs to be for real. The Careers Festival has to reflect reality.
And there's the rub. Sometimes, and in some cases, there is a gap between the image that the industry wishes to portray and the reality experienced by those joining it. Before companies "open their doors", they have to be sure that what is experienced actually stands up to scrutiny.
That's the first point, but there are two more.
First, the Careers Festival doesn't take place until the end of March next year. That's a long way off, and there's a danger that companies will forget about it until the last minute - and then it will be too late to organise anything and the opportunity will be lost. Launching the festival now gives operators the chance to get things up and running, to stir enthusiasm among employees and make a splash.
The second point is that, in the planning of events for the festival, companies should consider the public relations angle much more than they have in the past.
It's all very well staging an event, taking a few photographs and hoping that the trade press will show some interest. The trade press (Caterer, at least) will play its part, but spreading the word in the hospitality community is preaching to the converted.
It is the national, regional and local press and media that need to get the message. It is the general public - and, most importantly, schoolchildren and their parents - who need to understand the attractions of catering and hospitality as a career option.
Springboard as an organisation, and the companies that support it, are mature enough now to know that the long-term success of the movement is much more important than the short-term glow generated by the plaudits of their contemporaries.
If the Careers Festival is about anything, it is about getting the message across to a broader church of non-believers.
Forbes Mutch
EditorCaterer & Hotelkeeper
