A LOCAL PERSPECTIVE

It’s up to us, as an industry, to address SA’s hospitality skills shortage.

Despite its status as a country with one of the world’s highest unemployment rates, many industries in South Africa are faced with chronic skills shortages — and the already hard-hit hospitality sector is not immune, for several reasons.

By Garnet Basson, chief operating officer at The Capital Hotels and Apartments.

The sector was among the hardesthit during the Covid-19 lockdowns, with many establishments having to close their doors, either temporarily or permanently. Faced with an uncertain future, many of the industry’s skilled workers – its IT staff, marketing leaders, and experienced managers – turned to other industries for employment, and they’ve not come back.

Highly portable hospitality-specific skills, like chefs for example, are highly sought after elsewhere in the world too, and the opportunity to work abroad and earn foreign currency is appealing to many South Africans. In turn, our people are valued abroad for their excellent skills and strong work ethic, making us a chosen source market for head-hunters who are seeking the best possible recruits for their clients.

Many are willing to go because there’s still uncertainty in the local market as Covid-19 restrictions remain in place in South Africa, despite having been lifted nearly everywhere else in the world. This, along with flight costs soaring and a global increase in the cost of living, adds friction to tourists’ choice of holiday destination, which in turn impacts our inbound tourism stats negatively.

While we’re mindful of the reasons that there’s a skills shortage in the South African hospitality sector, we’re not sitting back and waiting for things to change — we’re living the famous words of Mahatma Ghandi, and we’re being the change we want to see.

After a Covid-19-led hiatus, we’ve reopened The Capital Hotel’s Hospitality Academy. The Academy offers a range of tailor-made courses that are able to equip anyone wanting to grow in the hospitality industry with the skills they need. While our own colleagues get first option to sign up for the courses, which vary from housekeeping to hotel management, they are open to anyone who would like to acquire the skills they need to grow and succeed in this industry. While our own colleagues get first option to sign up for the courses, which vary from housekeeping to hotel management, they are open to anyone who wants to acquire the skills they need to grow and succeed in this industry.

In addition to building and growing our own pipeline of talent, we have always focused on nurturing and developing our own people, in line with our inherently entrepreneurial approach to doing business. Doing so has seen many of our colleagues progress through the organisation, learning new skills while they’re working, and then qualifying for opportunities to apply them in promotion positions.

This focus on our people has always been part of our ethos, and our strategy – throughout the Covid-19 restrictions – was to find ways to stay operational, so that our people could still earn the income that they were accustomed to.

Our combined approach of making skills development possible for those wanting to grow, working with our people to define a clear career path and then walking that journey with them, as well as keeping our peoples’ interests at the top of our ‘to-do’ list, gives us reassurance that The Capital Hotels and Apartments will remain more insulated from the country’s skills shortage than other players in the industry. However, despite convention dictating that we should wish that others wouldn’t emulate our approach, we do actually wish that more hotel groups would invest in their people, and in turn in the industry, so that we build it back into the economic and employment powerhouse that it was, pre-Covid-19.

Who is Garnet Basson?

Garnet Basson is the chief operating officer of The Capital Hotels and Apartments. He is responsible for generating revenue and achieving regional goals across all the hotel group’s properties, and manages its more than 1,100 employees. Garnet is married with two children.