Why Shouldn’t Work and Workers meet?
At the end of the 90s, I organized an ESF course with Rome’s municipality.. an idea of mine aimed at the realization of a course for hotel receptionists whose goal was to train around 20 unemployed girls. It was directed only to girls, as at the time they were very underrepresented in Rome’s hotels, and their employment level was absolutely lower compared to the European average. My project won with an excellent scoring!
As I believed in what I was doing, I devoted a lot of effort to the training and, right after the internship, the majority of those who wanted to continue the path on a professional level got employed. Proud of the achieved results, I met with Rome’s municipality about the possibility to organize another course, considering the results obtained with the first one.
What I found was just coldness and lack of interest, despite the consistent and certain employment drop. And it’s not over: as they didn’t understand that all those various job opportunities had been created by me and the training given to the girls, they decided to have another person present a project with another name, but the same content as mine. This person had absolutely no more skills than I did to carry out an idea that was entirely mine.
Those who proposed projects for the EFS courses know the amount of work that lies behind their creation, made elaborated and twisted by bureaucracy. Once the project has been done and – above all – accepted, resubmitting it is really easy: you just need to copy its content!
I felt resentful that an idea of mine was presented by someone else.. with who knows what commitment. However, their answer was that I had no right to claim the exclusivity of the idea.
Yes, correct (is it?), but.. what about the ethics?
We are all obsessed (or at least that’s what it seems) by the need to create job positions, but… What do the institutional bodies and the experts in the field do? I tried to put myself in the shoes of a person who looks for a job in a hotel, and asked myself: what would I do? Whom would I send my CV to?
Other than sending my CV endlessly, knowing that only a few people or even nobody would read it, and other than contacting the friend of a friend of a friend… What else does the market offer?
There surely are online websites that gather supply and demand together, such as LinkedIn, but there is nobody who is interested (I underline it, interest) in meeting both supply and demand, trying as hard as I did for that course.
By means of the creation of Revenue Academy, we are trying to give a contribution that goes in the right direction. Personally, my aim is to create what I should have done in those years with Rome’s municipality, that is a “container” of WELL-trained people which all hotel companies can draw from.
Our Team is growing (From 2 to 19 people in the last two years), the hotels we are taking care of are getting more and more and often ask for our support to find personnel who has been trained in a “Revenue way”. Moreover, some learned “journey companion” who run companies that gravitate in the hotel orbit are particularly interested in employing people who come out from the Academy.
Obviously, we do know that we can’t guarantee a job to everybody, especially in the present society. However, what we can guarantee for sure is that we will do our best to find a job to all those who will come out from the classes of our Academy, as it is in our own interests! The success of the school is in our interests, as having people we trained to put in the Revenue world is!
This way, work supply and demand meet inevitably, as it happens thanks to a correct rate: the market is easier than it seems!
Franco Grasso
