Hospitality Connect to broaden scope and add more students into workforce pipeline

Hospitality Connect, the organisation that connects hotels with schools, is to broaden its scope to other areas of hospitality following its success rolling out across the country. 

The initiative, which was founded by 2022 Hotelier of the Year Adrian Ellis in the year before he held the title, has now expanded beyond its Manchester home to 15 regions in the UK. 

Ellis is now targeting expansion of the programme that has so far made 145 hotel and school partnerships, which are designed to educate and encourage students to consider exploring roles in hospitality. 

He said: “We have 15 cities and regions now, but there’s the potential to double that in the next year and a half.

“There’s also an opportunity to go into the wider industry, working with restaurants, cafes and contract catering, as well as the military. 

“However, much depends on generating funding and investing in more resource. We had two-year programme of funding from the Savoy Educational Trust, and they have been very generous but to achieve our goals we want to attract commercial match funding to support the growth we are aiming for.”

Hospitality Connect typically works with hotel associations that link it up with operators in their area as a way of addressing local skills shortages.

Ellis added: “Hotels realise they have a recruitment challenge long term, they can’t find people in their region and they may have worked with colleges and universities but not often not with schools. 

“Once we have a group of hotels we’ll go in to find the education providers and work out the schools to connect with a hotel. We then bring the colleges in, which forms our measure of success. Once students have been through the programme we measure how many people sign up for hospitality-related courses.”

In Milton Keynes, for example, Hospitality Connect has been working with six hotels and six schools, along with a further education college. It will then look to grow to some 20 operators so that the programme isn’t diluted or any partnerships undermined.

Ellis said: “In Manchester last year’s college intake went up from 25 college courses to 85, so we show real progress. We expect to see similar progress around other cities.”