Committing to staff training within the hospitality industry can be challenging. Shift patterns and busy workloads can make it difficult to schedule and find time to train team members – and to keep that training up to date. Yet poor levels of training and skill shortages are frequently cited as key issues facing hotels, bars and restaurants across the country.
Navitas Group has been helping foodservice and hospitality businesses to upskill staff with online training courses since 2013– and has recently become a recognised CPD training provider. But say the words online training to most people and dull slide shows constantly clicking the ‘next’ button often spring to mind. Navitas training courses couldn’t be more different.
With over 30 years’ experience in the health & safety and food safety sectors, Navitas has developed a wide range of tailored training courses. The focus is on making training cost-efficient, but more importantly fun and flexible. Designed to be effective, engaging and interactive Navitas’s online training courses are enhanced by games and blended learning – using avatars, videos, interactive hotpods, PDFs, games and web pages from a wide variety of useful sources – to ensure maximum engagement amongst enrolled students.
And the signs are that more and more hotels and restaurants are recognising the benefits of this flexible and fun learning approach. Last year the Group delivered more than 80,000 training courses via Navitas Academy its online training platform covering food safety, allergen awareness, health & safety and fire safety, as well as alcohol licensing awareness and an introduction to GDPR.
“Investing in the ongoing training and development of staff should be a no-brainer for foodservice and hospitality businesses as their main aim is to provide great customer service whilst keeping customers and operations safe,” says Ben Gardner, CEO of Navitas Group. “But there’s absolutely no reason this training should be dull. We want to provide relevant, interesting courses to encourage hotels, bars and restaurants to gain an advantage by developing staff skills and knowledge and also importantly demonstrating a commitment to these staff.”
He adds: “This could make a crucial difference to a business at a time when attracting and retaining staff is becoming a real challenge for the industry in general.”
In addition to being recognised as a CPD provider – the leading independent accreditation institute for Continued Professional Development – following stringent training principles, five of Navitas Academy’s online courses – Level 2 Food Safety in Catering, Level 2 Health and Safety in Catering, Allergy Awareness, Managing Food Safety in Catering and Managing Health and Safety – have also each been assessed and approved by CPD.
Ben concludes: “Becoming a provider of CPD-accredited courses is a real testament to the quality of our online training. We’re pushing to gain further accreditation to help those in the industry enhance their personal skills and proficiency on an ongoing basis throughout their careers.”
For information on Navitas Group’s online training courses visit www.navitas.eu.com/academy.