Teaching Hospitality to the Next Generation

“No one wants to work anymore”, “Kids these days just don’t want to put the graft in”. You’ll hear these tropes everywhere- you may have even said one (or both) of them yourself as you’ve going through the frustrations of trying to hire people. The number of jobs in the hospitality sector have fallen from 3.2m (pre-Covid) to 2.7m as of June 2025. The CIPD report “Megatrends” does claim that hospitality is one of the youngest industries in the UK with an average age of… wait for it… 34. Over 50s now make up 34% of the UK hospitality workforce - an increase of approximately 165,000 people from 2020 to 2023.

I don’t want to go into too much detail on the whys and wherefores, but I believe that this is in part due to an ageing population, and the increase in National Minimum Wage for lower age brackets (I’ve stated this previously that I believe that we’d see a rise in unemployment for younger people as the NMW bandings come closer together - why employ an 18 year old for not much less than a 50 year old who has quite literally decades more experience). Then we’ve also had Covid - a lot of young people in the industry didn’t have a choice but to seek employment elsewhere, they then had a taste of what a work-life balance looks like, and they’ve not looked back since.

Maybe there’s a little truth to the trope that “kids don’t want to put the graft in anymore” due to the 10% on 10% on 10% increase that we’ve seen in National Minimum Wage between 2023 to 2025- they don’t need to put the same amount of graft in as they once did as they’re now that they’re earning significantly more than they have ever done. If these increases had happened prior to Covid, then I think that we’d be looking at a completely different landscape - we’d see more people of lower age range spending money in hospitality venues, but I believe that Covid put a bit of a stop to this - they’re just not interested in going out as much as most of us where when we were 18.

Think about it, when you turned 18 (or near enough) it was a right, nay, an obligation to go to the pub on your birthday. When you started Uni, Fresher’s Week was a rite of passage. If you were (un)lucky enough to look under 18 then you might have a house party when your parents were out (God only knows how much trouble I got in for doing this). Your older (or older looking) mate would go to the off licence for you, get everything you needed, and you’d be sorted for the night. Covid stopped all of this. University courses were carried out by distance learning, you couldn’t have a house party (unless you were a Tory party member), and your birthday was most likely on Zoom. We were all in a situation that drastically changed how we had to socialise, and this radical change was enough to virtually eradicate that unspoken British tradition of getting tanked as soon as the law allowed.

When the pubs shut, that whole coming-of-age thing disappeared overnight. The money didn’t vanish though - it just started going elsewhere.

What happened? A lot of online articles report that their “spending habits changed”. I’d argue that since they didn’t have access to this Rite of Passage, their habits didn’t “change” as they didn’t form those habits in the first place- they were reduced to spending whatever they had online - either putting more money into clothes, technology, digital subscriptions to fight off the boredom, or by taking up a hobby (my daughter was only 7 or 8 at the time that Covid was in full swing, so the booze option wasn’t really on the table, but instead of days out we had to have days in - playing boardgames, drawing, painting, or watching movies, and these are habits that she has keep over the last 5 years).

I might ruffle a few feathers here, but the hospitality business owners that are shouting “kids don’t want to put the graft in” typically seem to be the kind of people that also say “it’s not my fault that x, y, or z happened, it’s someone else’s”- they don’t take responsibility for people not wanting to work for them anymore because they’re stuck in their own trap of working more to get what they want and they take the view that because they have to do this, then so should everyone else.

Over the course of my hospitality career, I’ve had the fortune of managing people from all walks of life, and whilst I can confidently say that those over 50 usually have a better work ethos, the only “kids” that didn’t have the same were the ones that didn’t know anything about the business that they’d applied for- we all know that hospitality can often revert to a “bodies on the floor” mentality and we’ve all hired people for the sole purpose of filling a gap. The trouble with this is that we don’t spend any time teaching them about the business that they’re working in and we don’t treat them as though they’re anything more than a short-term solution.

We’ve got a client with two sites in Liverpool - Arts Bar Baltic and Arts Bar Hope Street. Their team is primarily comprised of people attending one of the Universities in Liverpool, so the owners know that they’ve got at most 3 years with these people, and a whole load of peak periods where a lot of their team members will want to travel back to their hometown to spend time with their families. This means that they’ve got a very limited amount of time to train them up to the point where they’re self-sufficient and they generate more in revenue than they cost. Yet down the line, some of these people actually reapply for a job once they’ve finished Uni and moved back home whereas most venues are struggling to get people to turn up for trial shifts in the first place. They treat their team well, and they have no end of applications coming through social media. I’ve just checked through their Xero accounts, and at the time of writing this (October 2025), there has not been a single payment to a job site or recruiter in the 6 years since Arts Bar Hope Street opened and the 3 years since Arts Bar Baltic opened - not one. Impressive, right?

I know that this is a rather small case study in the grand scheme of thigs, but if young people didn’t want to work, then these guys would be out of a business. Some of these directors had previously worked with/for one of my other clients when they were about the same age as their employees are now.

The clients we have that tend to retain their teams (including younger members of the workforce) typically have one thing in common- they explain the impact that their employees’ roles have on the business, why they are important, and what they can do to have a bigger impact. In their sites, you don’t often hear:

“Don’t do it like that, do it like this”

“But why?”

“Because I said so”

Instead, you'll hear; “Don’t do it like that, do it like this because of…”

People rarely leave a job because they feel valued, they leave because they don’t. We’re a naturally social species and if you’ve already read the bit (my article) about Neurochemicals, then you’ll understand that we derive more pleasure from helping other people than we do from helping ourselves. If your team don’t know how to help, then they can’t feel as though they have any value to the business. If they don’t feel as though they have any value, then they’re going to leave.

So ultimately, we need to teach our team to make sure that they understand what their role is and why you’re asking certain things of them. The other thing to understand about younger people is that most of them crave knowledge and they pick things up at a much quicker pace than people over the age of 30ish (the average age at which your brain loses more neurons than it produces) – so they have the capacity to learn more. Once you’ve got the standard “this is how you clean a table” out of the way, I’d start looking at how their actions and decisions have an impact on the finances of the business.

My Management Accountant Wendy and I examined around 400 sets of Management Accounts and we found that approximately 70% of net revenue that comes in goes straight back out on costs that are directly controlled or influenced by your everyday team- so why wouldn’t you want them to know about their impact?

With that in mind, here are the things that all of your team need to know:

1. Where the money goes - a breakdown of £100 coming through the till, what gets spent and where, and what’s left.

2. How to properly cost food and drink - I see too many owners with bar experience hiring a chef and thinking “they’ve done this for years, they’ll know what to do” only to find that their GP is in the toilet. The same applies for chef owners hiring a bar manager. You can’t monitor what you don’t understand.

3. Labour and scheduling - I see the job of doing the rota being passed on to team members. It is seen as an easy (and possibly fool-proof) task- you’re right. It isn’t hard to put together a rota, especially if you have historic versions to hand, but if you’ve no idea how to cost a rota, then they don’t either. Your two biggest expenses are staff and stock, so why on earth would you gamble with them not knowing how to do this properly?

4. Reading a P&L - ok, so I’m all for open book management- all my team have access to my Xero account, and they can all see my P&L. They know what I earn (which quite frankly isn’t enough) and they don’t care. I’m not saying that you need to start giving them access to everything, but if you don’t give them access to at least a restricted version of your P&L then you can be damn sure that they’re going to assume things about your business e.g. if the business’s turnover is £20,000 per week, then they’ll assume that you make £20,000 per week. Different parts of your team can see different parts of your business- everyone knows what your revenue is, the bar know how much profit you’re making on a cocktail, and the kitchen knows how much you’re paying to buy stuff in- but none of them know the combined totals, how VAT affects this, or what effect labour has on the bottom line.

5. Smart spending - stop letting them buy all your shit from Amazon. You need par levels and for them to know when it’s ok to order before they run out and not to panic buy online.

You’re possibly thinking that “the title of this was “Teaching Hospitality to the Next Generation”, so where on Earth is he going with this?” so I’ll get to my point: if we don’t start putting plans in place to teach rather than preach then there won’t be a next generation for hospitality - our town centres will comprise of larger, standardised corporations, fast food outlets, and grubby bars. You’re reducing your own talent pool from which you’re able to promote, and you’re inevitably robbing the future generations of the colour and variety that comes along with the industry.

You’ll never leave your mark.