Tag Archives: Career Advice

The Powerful Pull of Restaurant Careers

This post brought to you by National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation . The content and opinions expressed below are that of upstartHR.

Over the past few weeks as we have explored various areas of the restaurant industry, including career opportunities, compensation, and more. Today I want to direct your attention to the power of the industry both in providing initial job opportunities as well as long-term prospects. Here are a few of the key statistics from the infographic below:

  • The restaurant industry provides a great start for younger workers. 92% of restaurant employees younger than 18 say their first job was in the restaurant industry.
  • Many of these employees stay in the industry for a long time. Restaurant employees ages 25- to 34-years old have a median tenure of 10 years in the industry, while employees ages 35-to-44-years have a median tenure of 19 years.
  • Many who venture out of the industry return: 60% of restaurant industry employees 35 and older have returned to the industry after stints in other fields.
  • This is an industry that allows employees time to pursue higher education. 64% of bartenders, 49% of restaurant managers and 41% of servers are currently attending a four-year college or university.

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Jobs for Life? Restaurant Careers Reward Long Term Commitment

This post brought to you by National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation . The content and opinions expressed below are that of upstartHR.

Over the past few weeks we have looked at competitive compensation, career paths, and work skills as they relate to careers in the restaurant field.

Today the focus will be on the value of a long term commitment to a career within the restaurant industry. Check out a few of the facts:

  • Lifelong careers in the restaurant industry are not uncommon. 70% of restaurant employees plan to stay in industry until they retire.
  • This is shown in the fact that the median tenure of restaurant management and business operations employees is 20 years in the industry.
  • A job in the restaurant industry pays off: 71% of salaried restaurant managers, 50% of salaried shift/crew supervisors and 47% of salaried chefs/cooks earned a bonus in the past year.

In a time when many are worried about long term job stability, I think it’s a powerful testament to the long term value of these professions for 7 out of 10 employees to want to remain in the industry until retirement.

In addition, when many corporate employees are facing limited (if any) bonuses, the fact that 47-71% of restaurant employees received some bonus in recognition of their efforts is pretty astounding. The one that most stuck out from my point of view is the manager group receiving more bonuses than other staff–that’s yet another inspiration for the other employees to aspire to a higher level of leadership.

In the infograpic below titled “Dedication Pays Off,” you can see these and other statistics that prove the long term value of a career within the restaurant field.

Which one is most impactful for you?

Dedication Pays Off

 

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Show Me the Money! Restaurant Careers Provide Competitive Compensation

This post brought to you by National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation . The content and opinions expressed below are that of upstartHR.

As we continue the discussion about the restaurant industry, we’ve seen some great content as far as jobs and career tracks. One of the first things people consider when looking at career options is the compensation. A few of the more common questions:

What will I make? Can I provide for my family? What about growth of pay over time?

As you can tell from the information below, the responses to those questions are definitely positive. The infographic below looks at some key areas around these questions, but the following points are especially pertinent:
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  • The numbers are clear – there are very competitive wages available to employees of the restaurant industry. Chefs and cooks make a median base salary of $50,000, while restaurant managers make a median base salary of $47,000.
  • Salaries in the industry are not stagnant. Entry-level employees receive a pay raise, on average, within six months of hire. About 70% of managers and shift/crew supervisors have received a raise within the past year.
  • The industry goes beyond hourly pay; by mid-career, 57% of restaurant employees are salaried.

One of the stats that I’m particularly surprised by is the growth of wages over time, particularly the 70% figure for managers and supervisors. That is a prime example of the type of growth and opportunity available within the industry that might otherwise not be obvious to those unfamiliar with the restaurant field.

In the infographic titled “Do The Math” you can find some of the key areas that people want to learn about regarding restaurant career compensation.

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So, what are your thoughts regarding compensation in the restaurant industry? Did anything in here surprise you?

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Restaurant Career Paths: The Journey Upward

This post brought to you by National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation. The content and opinions expressed below are that of upstartHR.

One of the areas we have focused on in previous weeks is how careers in the restaurant industry are more substantial than what they might appear on the surface. Today we’re going to look at career tracks specifically.

Here are a few of the key statistics from the infographic below.

  • Your first job in the restaurant industry is only the beginning. The industry offers mobility, as more than 9 out of 10 restaurant employees 35 or older have advanced to a higher-paying job in the industry. 71% of those between 18 and 24 have also advanced to higher paying positions in the restaurant industry.
  • Restaurant owners and operators climb the ladder to success as well. 55% of owners and operators worked in the industry as wait staff, 59% as a chef or cook and 84% as a restaurant manager.
  • Most staff in the industry also see it as an industry of opportunity. A majority of waitstaff, bartenders, bus persons, chefs/cooks, shift/crew supervisors, managers and operations employees believe the restaurant industry offers opportunity for advancement.

Of all of these, my favorite is the second. Owners are typically seen as the top of the “food chain” (awful pun, but it’s true!) for the industry. But more often than not those owners are not strangers to the restaurant world–they are former employees!

That’s a powerful message for those working in the field, because it not only helps the owners to understand the roles of employees better, but it also gives employees a vision for what the future could look like for them if they aspire to achieve the same level of success.

In the infographic titled This Way to the American Dream below, you can see some of the ways the career path discucssion has played out for employees in the industry. What’s the most striking statistic you see?

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How to Start a Sideline HR Consulting Business

Today I’m going to talk about running a small business, marketing, and product creation. If that’s not your thing, come back later this week for more great HR-centered content.

I think everyone has knowledge that is worth sharing. Some of that knowledge, you might have found, might even be worth some compensation. This past week I wrote a post for my friends at Careerealism, and it focuses on how I started the journey years ago into the world of HR consulting. Here’s a piece of that:

I'll be honest—the first consulting meeting with the CEO and Vice President of the company was pretty stressful. They wanted some help in defining their hiring methods, creating documents to support the new process, and so on. It was all work that I've had experience doing, but stepping out from under the corporate umbrella on my own felt just plain weird.

I told them that I could do the work for them, offered a rate for the project, and shook hands to seal the deal.

Over the following weeks, I provided them with the various work products and consulting time they had requested, and when I finally received the check in the mail, I felt something special stir in my heart. At the time, I wasn't sure what that was, but now I can say with certainty what I was feeling.

What we all want

In that moment, standing at the mailbox and looking at the check, I realized that someone else thought that my knowledge and expertise was valuable enough to pay me for it. I think that's a big hurdle for many of us to get over, so I will say it again: Someone else thought my knowledge was worth paying for.

I think it's something we all hope for. We want to be worth something. We want others to value what we have to say. And if we can get paid for doing those things, then that's the best of both worlds.

Advice on starting

Are you interested in picking up some extra work? Maybe you'd like to start that consulting business you've dreamed of? Whatever the case, consider this: You are good enough at something that people will pay you for it.

In order to do this, you need to understand:

  1. What that is
  2. How you can position it
  3. How you can get connected to clients

If you can do all three of those, you'll have your first gig before you know it.

In the business world, we call that your unique value proposition. Know what you can bring that someone else can't, be able to communicate the value of that knowledge/service, and find people who are willing to pay to have that type of problem solved. Even if you're approaching a company about a job and not in a consulting role, the same rules apply. Source: http://www.careerealism.com/marketing-value-anyone/

This basic info can get you started, but there are other tips and ideas that I normally share with those looking to get into this exciting new world. Here’s one of the most valuable…

Creating a product

Consulting, in the end, is about trading dollars for hours. Give me dollars, I’ll give you hours. But when you create a product of some kind, you can scale that business beyond what it currently can stand. I always recommend that new consultants consider the top two or three questions they receive. The next step is to create something–a video, a short PDF guide, or something similar that answers one of those questions in great detail.

If someone paid you to answer that question with half an hour of your time, use that half hour of video or 10 pages of written material (or both) to do that for someone. Then you’re no longer limited by the number of hours in a week, you can pitch the product to a new market, and you can grow the business in new, exciting ways.

This is a recipe for growth that most HR consultants never tap into. And if you’ve been thinking about starting your own small (or large) consulting business from the ground up, this is a great place to start. 

Job Seeker Tip #347-Passion Matters

I have been thinking about interviewing lately. I was telling a group I spoke to earlier in the week about the importance of finding people that are “sold out” on the culture and the organization. It never ceases to amaze me that some people still fail to prepare adequately for their interviews. No, I’m not talking about knowing how to answer the canned”What’s your greatest weakness?” type questions. I’m talking about being excited, upbeat, and ready to talk about how you are the perfect fit for the job.

Here’s a good example. I can still vividly remember an interviewing process for a subcontracts administrator position. We interviewed more than half a dozen people in the first round. Three of those were lukewarm and honestly left me wondering if they really wanted a job at all. Two of those were both enthusiastic and qualified. One of those was both very enthusiastic and very overqualified. Those three people were the ones brought back for a second interview, and in fact I was able to pick the person that was ultimately chosen days before the “final” selection (though that is always the hiring manager’s call in the end). How did I know?

  1. She made a great case for why the company would be better off with her specific experience.
  2. She shared with us her interest in why she would specifically like to work at our company (not just a company like ours, but ours specifically!).
  3. She was a great culture fit for us. Her previous actions and behavioral questions were closely aligned with our core values.

Honestly, I don’t care if you’re applying for jobs through Jobtonic, a job with my company, or something else. If you’re qualified for the position, and you can figure out how to do all three of those things, then you have a much greater chance of being selected than those who don’t. It’s not a magic bullet, but it’s a formula that I’ve seen play out on many occasions.

What is your take on passion and enthusiasm in the interview process? Is it a discriminator or just noise interfering with the process?

Love What You Do, Even If Others Don’t

I need to get something off my chest. It has been on my mind for a while now, and I feel like it’s time to come clean.

mountain maniaI love running hills.

Yeah, I know. You might question my sanity and wonder about the safety of my family. It’s a risk I’m willing to take. I couldn’t let that stand between us any more…

Okay, so let’s take a little step back toward serious for a moment. The point of today’s post is that you need to love what you do, even if others might not understand how or why. I have several examples of how this has played out in my own life, a second opinion from a noted economist and another HR expert, and a solid conviction that this is the right way to go. Ready? Let’s dive in.

Learn to love what others hate

The way I have put it for years is this: learn to love what others hate. Now, I’m not saying you need to all of the sudden fall in love with [insert evil vegetable here] or [that weird guy nobody can stand at work]. I’m saying that you can be great–truly great–by learning to love the things that others won’t do. It’s one of the easiest ways to stand out, make a name for yourself, and/or be seen as an expert.

godzillaOne of the silliest examples is when I started a previous job. There was a monstrosity of a fax machine that the HR department used, but it was finicky and fairly old. My first few days on the job, I realized how much everyone truly hated that fax machine. So I spent a few hours and programmed in all of the internal and regularly-used external numbers in, saving everyone a little hassle.

You’d think I had killed Godzilla with my bare hands. The staff in the department was a little over the top appreciative, and I was sitting there in my first “real” HR job trying to figure out what just happened. Because if I could repeat it, I knew it would mean good things for my career long-term.

Back to running for a second

I’ve recounted some of my running tales here and here in the past. It’s one of the activities I truly enjoy. This year I have set a few personal records (PR’s, for those who like acronyms), and it’s because I really started working on a few things that other people hate–hills, speedwork, eating smarter, etc. In fact, I not only did them, but I really started to enjoy them. It became a game…

  • How much could I improve over last time?
  • Could I set a new record today?
  • Let’s try a new vegetable/fruit this week.

You get the picture. I’ll never be world class, but I can be competitive for my age group. And it doesn’t happen by doing what everyone else does–you have to be willing to do the things the others won’t. That’s when you really get results.

The running analogy might not fit with everyone, but here’s where it matters:

  • What if I applied that at work?
  • What if I was constantly trying to improve my skills and abilities in the workplace to better serve the people around me?
  • What would the result be?

Learn to love what others hate. 

More Freakonomics

Another enjoyment of mine is listening to podcasts. Fun fact: I never listen to the radio in the car. However, I will occasionally listen to an interesting podcast to keep my mind occupied on long trips.

A few weeks ago I heard this and knew I had to write a post about it. Steve Levitt, author and economist, talks about loving what you do. Here’s the transcript:

LEVITT: I think fun is so much more important than people realize. And I've seen it in academics. When I interview young professors and try and decide if we should hire them. I've evolved over time to one basic rule, if I think they love economics and its fun for them I am in favor of hiring them. No matter how talented they seem otherwise if it seems like a job or effort or work then I don't want to hire them.

DUBNER: Persuade me that they won't just be nice to have around because they love fun, but that having fun at what you do makes you better, or different in some way that is positive.

LEVITT: Enjoying what you do, loving what you do is such a completely unfair advantage to anyone you are competing with who does it for a job. People who love it they go to bed at night thinking about the solutions. They wake up in the middle of the night, and they jot down ideas, they work weekends. It turns out that effort is a huge component of success in almost everything. We know that from practice and whatnot. And people who love things work and work and work at it.  Because it's not work — its fun. And so my strongest advice to young people trying to figure out what they want to do, is I always tell them: try to figure out what you love, especially something you love that other people don't love. Everyone want to be rock star or everyone wants to be in the movies, but that's terrible you don't want to compete head on. Find some…if  you love ants, go study ants. Because no one else loves ants and you'll have a big advantage over the people who are just studying ants because they can't think of what else to do. Source

I underlined the pieces that were specifically powerful for me. The big takeaway: find out what you love that others don’t, then go do that well.

People who are passionate about a topic have a massive competitive advantage over those that are not. You can’t outwork someone who’s passionate about what they do.

Closing thoughts

When I first got into HR, I had someone tell me, “Wow, you really have a passion for this stuff. Don’t worry, that will die down soon enough.”

At that moment, I promised myself that I would never let that passion die. It’s expected. It’s common. And it’s something I’m unwilling to budge on. That is one of the underlying motivations that drives this blog year after year–the commitment to not only being excited about what I do, but also to help others continue to be excited as well. HR isn’t something many people would want to do. But it’s something we can be great at.

In the past few weeks I was on a NextChat with the team at SHRM talking about what it takes for students to get into HR. Here’s a piece of advice from a friend of mine during the discussion that I wholeheartedly endorse. I’d like to hear your thoughts in the comments–do you think what he says is true? What about the comments from Steve Levitt above?