Everyone Wants Experienced Workers. But Nobody Wants to Create Them.

Everybody wants experienced workers. There is nothing wrong with that. If I’m running a large company, I want experienced workers too. I want people who know what they’re doing, understand service, can solve problems on their own, and don’t need constant supervision. Experience matters. It always has.

What I don’t understand is where people think experienced workers come from. At some point somebody had to teach them. Somebody had to explain how a banquet works, how to read a BEO, how to manage a section, how to communicate with a kitchen, and how to survive a busy service without falling apart. Nobody starts this business knowing any of that.

The industry used to understand this. New employees learned from experienced employees. Captains taught servers. Chefs taught cooks. Managers developed future managers. People started at the bottom, made mistakes, improved, and eventually became the experienced workers everybody wanted to hire.

That process feels broken now.

A lot of operations are so focused on filling shifts that they no longer have the time or patience to develop people. Training becomes rushed. Mentorship disappears. Managers spend more time covering positions than building teams. Instead of creating experienced workers, companies search for people who already have experience and hope somebody else did the hard work first.

The other problem is compensation. We’ve created an industry where experience is treated as extremely valuable during the hiring process but not always during payroll. Employers ask for years of experience, leadership ability, professionalism, reliability, and open availability. Then they offer wages that barely separate experienced employees from brand-new hires.

It’s a strange contradiction. We say experience matters, but we often don’t invest the time required to create it or the money required to keep it.

Then people wonder why turnover stays high. They wonder why standards continue to slip. They wonder why fewer people stay in hospitality long enough to become supervisors, captains, trainers, and leaders. The answer may be simpler than we think.

For years we’ve been looking for experienced workers while spending less time creating them.

I’ve spent most of my career in hospitality. I’ve worked alongside people who were given an opportunity, taught the job, developed their skills, and eventually became some of the strongest employees on the team. I’ve also watched those same opportunities disappear as operations became leaner, managers became more overwhelmed, and training became an afterthought.

The reality is that experienced workers are not found. They are built.

At Fenix Workforce Foundation, we believe workforce development should not begin after someone already has experience. It should begin before they have it. We believe large events, hospitality operations, and real-world work environments can still be places where people learn, grow, and develop the skills employers are looking for. If the industry wants experienced workers tomorrow, somebody has to be willing to train them today.