On 27 May 2016, the Eßlinger Zeitung published the following article about us and our new trainees.
By Alexander Maier
Trainees are currently more sought after than they have been for a long time. What pleases school leavers is a worry for some employers: many industries find it difficult to find applicants – such as the restaurant and hotel industry, which is often desperately looking for trainees. In its search for suitable candidates, the Esslingen hotel Ecoinn am Campus is looking south. In Croatia and Spain, hotel director Thomas Puchan has found nine young people who have no chance at home and are therefore seeking the opportunity to complete qualified vocational training as hotel specialists here. Puchan is confident that the concept will prove itself. And he can well imagine other employers following this example.
In the hotel industry, being mobile is part of the job. “I worked in nine businesses before I came to the Ecoinn,” Puchan says. “International experience in particular pays off in this industry.” There is no shortage of interested applicants in southern Europe: three suitable candidates were found in Croatia through the Kolping education organisation, and Thomas Puchan and Rainer Dold, managing director of the Ecoinn operator SHT, selected another six in Spain. And after getting to know each other in the candidates’ home countries, the young people are due to come to Esslingen at the beginning of July for a pre-training internship.
The Esslingen hotel operators are not the first to recruit trainees in other European countries – and by no means everyone who has already taken this route has been successful. From his Spanish employee Olga Contreras Alfonso, who was trained at another German hotel and is now a permanent fixture at the Ecoinn reception, Puchan knows that the beginning can be difficult if the necessary framework conditions are lacking. “We have tried to learn from the mistakes of others,” Puchan explains. “It is not enough to bring young people here from abroad and offer them good professional training. You also have to look after them beyond the purely professional side.” That is Franziska Rettenbacher’s job.
As a trained hotel specialist and a graduate in social pedagogy, she has everything it takes to look after the new trainees from Spain and Croatia as well as possible. “They can come to me with anything,” the trainee supervisor explains. “I want to make settling in and everyday life as easy as possible for them. Only those who feel at home can learn optimally.” Part of the concept is that the young people will live at the Ecoinn. “It also helps that we have concentrated on two nationalities,” Franziska Rettenbacher says. “That way our new trainees always have someone they can talk to without language barriers.”
MobiPro makes many things possible
Because a lack of language skills is one of the most important training risks, the Ecoinn places particular emphasis on the future hotel specialists having basic language skills on their very first working day. “We expect level B1,” says Thomas Puchan. Anyone with language skills at this level should be able to hold a conversation independently. And it does not stop there: language courses are a compulsory part of the training for the trainees from Spain and Croatia. Thanks to funding from the EU programme MobiPro, a great deal is possible, from social-pedagogical support and language lessons to occasional trips home.
Otherwise, training at the Ecoinn offers everything that future hotel specialists need – including the perfectly normal final examination. “So that the young people cover as broad a spectrum as possible and gain as much knowledge as possible, we work with partner businesses such as the Brauhaus zum Schwanen and the Palmscher Bau,” says Thomas Puchan. “Anyone who successfully completes this training will have something good to show for it afterwards – regardless of whether they stay here or return home.” And because the hotel boss is convinced of the idea, he hopes that the concept will soon be adopted by other businesses as well. “We are happy to share our experience with others,” promises Franziska Rettenbacher.