Impact of the skill gaps on hospitality businesses in the UK and recommendations to address them

Article by Dr.Ritika Sharma, PhD Chemistry, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, India

Skill gaps are the disconnections between the skills required by the employers to perform the specific job in an optimal way and the skills employees possess. Skill gaps often depend on job intricacies and expertise of employees to carry out those jobs. Although the workforce is the major expenditure for the hospitality industry, still there is a wide shortage of skilled and qualified workers across the industry in sectors like airlines, cruises, spas, casinos, health-care, restaurants, or hotels, etc., rendering many job positions to remain vacant. Skill gaps in the hospitality industry often emerge because of its rapidly evolving environment. Dynamics between supply and demand equilibrium, the advent of budding technologies, changes in customer requirements, or socio-economic turbulences often cause employees’ existing skills to become obsolete in the hospitality industry and bringing in expectations that the workforce keeps on imbibing new skills incessantly.

The hospitality business has been the essence as well as one of the core foundations for the UK. It is responsible for the country's extensive socio-economic development and prosperity. As per the UKHospitality (www.ukhospitality.org.uk), the hospitality industry contributed to 9% of the UK’s total jobs, amounting to about 3.2 million direct and 2.8 million indirect jobs, until the end of 2019. Thus, being a high-performing and dynamic industry, skill gap analysis is quite advantageous for the overall increase in the productivity of the hospitality business. It helps in scrutinizing the skill gaps and deficits amongst the existing workforce, finding out the factors causing skill gaps and skill development of the current workforce, assisting employers in hiring skilled workforce apt as per their environment, getting insight into future skills requirements in the industry, and understand the barriers for skill development of employees.

Skill Gaps and Deficits in the UK Hospitality Industry: Causes and Implications

The biggest challenge of the UK’s hospitality industry is the lack of soft skills amongst employees—communication, social and ethical awareness, management, leadership, flexibility, problem-solving, reasoning, agility, multitasking, cultural know-how, and customer service, etc are few to mention. As per the ONS (Office for National Statistics) data, 45% of the hospitality sector employees perform jobs where behavioral skills like customer satisfaction are crucial for life-long memorable and valuable customer experiences. Some of the examples of these roles include sales and customer service staff, waiters, bar staff, sanitization staff, etc. The sector often needs employees with high social and emotional skills and foreign-language knowledge so that they can serve customers understanding the cross-cultural differences and language barriers. But there is a huge deficiency of such skills amongst the existing workforce in the UK and also a large number of job vacancies because of the unavailability of skilled staff. The proportion of such employees that are not fully skilled in their role is above 8% (as per the report by "Economics Insight: Hospitality and Tourism workforce landscape, June 2019).

The hospitality industry also involves certain job types requiring skilled technical proficiencies and digital skills. With such technically-skilled labor difficult to find, positions often remain vacant or are filled with lower-skills employees. For example, for hotels and restaurants serving menus from different geographies, it is often very hard to recruit master-chefs who have multi-cuisine expertise. With the automation coming into the picture, employees are increasingly expected to know about the latest digital technologies like swipe-card or online payments, biometrics, use of robotic cleaners and waiters, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, etc. Many hotel cooking teams are turning towards state-of-art culinary and automatic packing technologies for attaining competence in the area. Many existing and experienced old-generation workers in the UK hospitality business lack knowledge of technology and digital skills. 

One of the predominant causes of labor shortage and productivity in the UK hospitality industry is the non-competitive wages of employees and longer working hours. Certain hospitality sub-sectors like hotels and restaurants often employ lower-skilled part-time workers or full-time employees that have comparatively lower-salaries, longer working hours, variable or late-night shifts, no weekend holidays, and autocratic managers leading in their lower productivity. Afore-mentioned factors discourage many higher-skilled youngsters to pick the industry for their profession.

Importance of Skill Gap Analysis in Studying Coronavirus and Brexit Repercussions

The UK hospitality industry was flourishing incessantly until 2019 with the total turnover of amounting to about ￡130bn (UKHospitality, Anniversary Newsletter, 2019) until it started decelerating since February 2020 because of the double thump of Coronavirus and Brexit repercussions. Post-Brexit, there has been a big deficit of skilled staff in the hospitality industry because of restrictions on European migrant employees in the industry to work in the UK. Thus, a lot of skilled European workers have left jobs post-Brexit because of the new labor laws and coronavirus pandemic is adding to this shortage by more and more migrants returning back to their countries. As per the KPMG, 2017 report for the BHA (British Hospitality Association), UK’s hospitality business is facing an employee-deficit challenge of more than 60k per annum workers from 2019 as a consequence of Brexit, with the gap expected to rise above 1 million workers through 2029. Furlough scheme by the UK government during the current pandemic crisis, with employees getting 80% salary from the government is further adding to deficiency of skilled labor in the UK hospitality industry. As per the April 2020 survey of UKHospitality, the hospitality sector shows quite an alarming hit with dwindling prospects in the business. GDP estimates released by the ONS on 14 May 2020 highlighted an extremely anomalous pushback on the hospitality sector. The UKHospitality Quarterly Tracker demonstrated 21.3% decline in first quarter (Q1) sales with UK’s economy plummeting by 2% during Q1 2020.

 With the pandemic wretchedness indicating no soon apparent ending in vision, there is a probability of only a limited workforce to resume services after lockdown relaxations. This prompts a comprehensive study at a granular level to understand the workforce specific skill gaps in the hospitality business of the UK. Detailed skill gap analysis is currently one of the most viable steps to help the business achieve efficiency enhancements as it restores normality. Examination of skill gaps during the lockdown period can help safeguard the industry and jobs of millions of individuals that are at risk and facilitate the impactful comeback of the hospitality industry of the UK in later 2020. The skill gap analysis of the workforce will help in future strategic growth and can rebuild the industry’s prospects to support the country’s economy.

Recommendations to Address Skill Gaps for Future Sustenance of UK’s Hospitality Industry

There are several recommendations and policies to address the skills gaps in the UK’s hospitality industry, especially to adapt as per the post-COVID-19 world. Revolutionary ideas are needed for strengthening the talent pipeline and building employee strength back, either by reskilling or training existing staff or by employing new upskilled staff.

1.     Businesses should offer flexible online training schedules for employees to learn the soft-skills and language skills (mentioned in the previous paragraph) which are mandatory for delivering outstanding consumer experience and increasing productivity of the industry.

2.     For adversely-affected tourism, hotels, and aviation businesses to subsist, and bloom, the workforce in these sectors needs to quickly learn new social and emotional skills and adapt to a new environment that requires increased sanitation and social distancing measures, before they re-open on the lifting of lockdown.

3.     There is a very high and quick need for newly skilled labor and existing employees to learn superior automation technology, data analysis, and digital skills in businesses like restaurants, hypermarkets, and grocery stores that are operating online during the pandemic period, with some of them even performing robotic deliveries.

4.     There is a need for comprehensive health and safety training, followed by job-specific and region-specific targeting training of employees before businesses reopen.

5.     Lockdown period should be invested to tackle issues arising due to cross-cultural teams by organizing online meetings of employees of diverse countries.

6.     The UK hospitality industry should invest current available time to modify its policies by introducing new career development programs, flexible working hours, salary packages, incentives, and perks to attract competent, highly-skilled, talented, and energetic young individuals, students, or apprentices.

7.     Measures should be taken for retaining existing apprentices within the organizations by offering them permanent career opportunities, thus saving their time and expenses by avoiding extensive recruitment process. Developed internally in organizations, apprentices possess the key skills, can be easily upskilled, and are extremely adaptable to meet demand and strengthen the workforce to endure the socio-economic turbulence.

8.     Retention of the general workforce is also quite important during this setback period since a team of already trained, long-term employees can create an environment of satisfaction and could be very valuable in imparting knowledge and skills to new employees during training programs.

9.      Managers must essentially undergo training programs that can assist them in gaining knowledge about the mental and physical health of their teams, to create a relaxing, friendly, and rewarding environment for supporting workforce retention during the pandemic.

Article by Dr. Ritika Sharma