Restaurant’s training a recipe for success

In-house program at White Spot lets cooks work while getting Red Seal

Steve Langridge has been working in restaurant kitchens since he was 16. After 12 years in the business and more than 8,100 hours in a kitchen, which qualified Langridge to write the Red Seal chef certification challenge exam, there were still some skills and knowledge he didn’t possess.

Luckily Langridge’s employer, Vancouver-based White Spot restaurants, set up an in-house skills upgrading program, which let him learn the skills he needed from James Kennedy, the chain’s corporate training chef.

The program gave Langridge a deeper sense of connection with the profession and a sense of loyalty to White Spot.

“It solidified that this is what I’m happy doing and this is where I want to be,” he said.

Langridge, who is the kitchen manager at a White Spot restaurant in Coquitlam, B.C., is now one of the chain’s 18 Red Seal certified chefs. Another 47 cooks are enrolled in the skills upgrading program, with most expected to graduate by the end of 2008.

Chefs with the national designation are in high demand in most kitchens and finding certified chefs is difficult, said Langridge. The traditional certification process for new chefs takes three years, with an annual month-long classroom component that interferes with an individual’s career.

“It’s very difficult to have somebody leave for a month at a time to go to college,” said Warren Erhart, president of White Spot.

In an effort to attract more young cooks and increase the number of nationally certified chefs it employs, White Spot, which has 67 restaurants in British Columbia and Alberta, is launching an in-house, Red Seal indentured apprenticeship pilot program in September.

“Unlike the traditional model, where they would have to leave their employer and go to college to get their skill-level training, we can provide that through the White Spot environment. We think it’s a more pragmatic way for people to both work in our restaurant and get paid to get their papers,” said Erhart. “We can customize our learning and training times around the business needs.”

Langridge and the other Red Seal chefs who completed the skills upgrading program will supervise the apprentices while they work in the kitchens. Kennedy, who has the certified chef de cuisine designation, will oversee the classroom component in the chain’s corporate kitchen for one day every three weeks.

Erhart hopes the program will help the chain retain more of its cooking staff. Before the upgrading program was available, White Spot lost several cooks who took jobs at other establishments in order to get the certification.

“We’re attracting people who are more ‘foodies’ to join White Spot and we’re keeping people working with us in our restaurants longer because they can now get their chef papers while working,” he said.

The labour market in Western Canada is very tight, and the hospitality industry is no exception.

“Our whole industry is having some challenges,” said Erhart. “It is harder to attract and retain people today.”

It’s the responsibility of all restaurateurs to create a positive working environment and make the business a first-choice career, not a fall-back job option, he said. Offering fully subsidized training and giving employees the chance to continually upgrade their skills is one way of doing that.

Under White Spot’s current training model, employees are reimbursed for one-half of training costs after successful completion of training and then they get the rest reimbursed after one year of service. However, the funding details for the indentured apprenticeship program haven’t been worked out yet, said Erhart.

A byproduct of the program is an increased awareness that there’s higher education involved in cook training, which in turn can encourage more young people to go into the profession, said Debbie Shore, an instructor at Malaspina University-College’s culinary arts program in Nanaimo, B.C.

“Any time you take any kind of education and put a professional side to it, there’s no negatives. I hope that what they’re doing helps all of the industry train their staff and get them into longer, lifetime learning,” she said.

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