Careers:TRAINING

Craft training in hotels and catering A valuable contribution to the debate on the relevance of further education courses to the industry is made by the publication of two reports by the Hotel and Catering Industry Training Board. The Craft Career is a summary of the findings of a survey covering a sample of former students who obtained City & Guilds qualifications in 1975. Apart from courses in cookery, where about a third of the students were on part‐time and day release, all but a very small number had studied full‐time. Most students found employment in the industry without much difficulty, mainly by answering advertisements or by direct approach to employers. Nearly 80 per cent of males found their first job in private sector employment; more than 50 per cent of females obtained their first job in the public sector. A large proportion of those leaving college took junior positions, often in areas for which their qualifications did not appear to be the most suitable, and women were even less likely than men to start in high‐status jobs or to obtain early promotion. Students who had been HCITB registered trainees fared substantially better than others. The general conclusions derived from the survey are that courses are considered both by students and employers to be insufficiently related to the realities of the working situation and that, as time goes on, there may be an increasing polarisation between, on the one hand, highly skilled craft workers requiring experience and development as well as college‐based training and, on the other hand, a larger number of workers at operative level whose training might be carried out more effectively in the work situation.