Learning & Development

As one of the leading foodservice providers in Ireland, we believe our people are the key to the success of our business.

We are committed to providing exceptional opportunities for employees to develop their careers and achieve their full potential. We aim to attract, develop and retain great people who are proud to work for Compass Group. We believe that everyone has the ability to make a difference.

Their professional development both on and off site is crucial to ensure the very best standards of delivery at all times. We have development programmes in all areas of delivery from frontline through to management.

We are also focused on developing great leaders in our business, we use succession planning and talent management tools to recognise and harness our internal talent and to recruit senior roles and grow our talent within.
From your Perfect Start on-boarding to our Tailored to YOU senior management training programme, our Learning and Development team have developed a full suite of programmes designed to unearth and grow your skills. Programmes offered include:

Perfect Start – our 12-week comprehensive on-boarding programme designed to welcome new members to the family
World Host – an externally accredited course designed to turn our frontline staff into Hospitality Superstars!
Accelerate – giving Frontline Staff the skills to leap into a Supervisory Role
Evolve – our mentoring programme for Managers we feel are ready for the next step in their career with us
Tailored to YOU – our personal development programme for senior management who we know are ready to be promoted to the highest levels within Compass Group.

The Perfect Start

Whichever part of the Compass family you join, we’ll welcome you to a great team, a great place to work and a great environment to flourish. Your learning journey in your first 12 weeks will be mapped out for you, ensuring you are fully supported, can access the right information and complete the right learning. It’s all about us helping you to be the best you can be.

Your first few weeks of learning is tailored to your job role and you won’t have to complete everything at once. You’ll gain access to specific health and safety training, learn about Compass culture, and complete job specific learning – all at a pace that works for you.

If you’re a business manager or join us in one of our central and support functions (like HR, IT or Finance) you’ll also attend one of our classroom inductions where you’ll learn more about the business and meet one of our fantastic team of trainers.

From there your development is in your hands. There are many exciting opportunities with Compass Group. It will be down to you to make the most of them.

To enable us to offer our teams externally accredited qualifications we needed a trusted training partner, this partner is world host (worldhost.uk.com). Our Learning & Development Business Partner based in Ireland is qualified to deliver World Host training supporting our commitment to excellence in customer service and enhancing reputation. The three elements covered are:

The Principles of Customer Service element is designed to enhance customer service skills and behaviours by providing the fundamentals of service professionalism.
The Ambassador Workshop element supports ambassadors [i.e. our team members] in providing a warm and friendly welcome to customers.
Customers with Disabilities programme aims to increase awareness and sensitivity towards customers with disabilities.

Having made the leap from frontline staff to a supervisory role based on merit, we fully believe people should go back to the beginning of a new process; the development journey to their next promotion, preparing them in advance rather than just panic promoting when we have an operational need. Our Training Academy prepares our future managers using the development programme below;

Team Leader and Supervisor Development

The Accelerate programme will develop the skills of potential and existing supervisors to enable them to take on more responsibility in their current roles and move on to larger roles in the future. It is a stepping stone for delegates to obtain their first management role. Accelerate takes supervisors through the key competences required by managers to deliver great service for your business:

The ability to lead others
The ability to inspire others
How to drive the delivery of outstanding customer service
Appraisals and development
Increasing productivity through the management of budgets and financial control

This industry development programme provides opportunities for our most talented and passionate managers to develop their careers. The programme is designed for colleagues in managerial roles in order to develop a pool of passionate, skilled managers ready to step into the next big role. The learning and experience that participants gain through Evolve benefits their current roles, increasing customer focus and commercial thinking, driving sales and growth and ensures we have confident, motivated and talented managers to lead every new contract from day one.

Evolve strengthens our ability to maintain a pipeline of talented managers for current and future succession programmes. When successful managers move on, we can replace them with trained, skilled replacements in an instant.

Evolve participants are assigned a personal, trained mentor who is a member of the senior management team and attend a number of workshops which are matched to key skills and competencies identified as essential in a Levy and Chartwells Group manager. In a similar way to the Academy, Evolve participants also spend time in other parts of Compass Group to enhance their understanding of how different areas.

The aim of the “Tailored to You” programme is to retain and develop our most talented leaders within our business; the senior management team and leadership team rated as high potential or promotable during the most recent annual performance review. We recognise that as our manager’s progress in their career development needs will become more specific to them and their future career plans. As such, the formal and structured development programmes we use at lower levels in the organisation become less relevant.

Tailored to You is designed to offer a process to build a personal development plan to address personal development and career progression needs. This document helps select the key activities that will aid our Head of HR to guide senior managers in getting where they want to be, which is generally a Regional Management role or a Central Support role. Having these three levels of management development in place ensure our team will have a clear development journey available to them once they achieve a supervisory role. The structure also means new starters coming in at a management level have access to continued development.

Culinary Academies

We are in essence a food business and as such we believe a separate training academy for the chefs and the food academy teams in our business is hugely important.

We have a dedicated Learning & Development Training Chef, Paolo Armani. His role is to own and deliver the in-house culinary training programmes.

Chef Academy
Our in-house Chef Academy is for all our aspiring Commis Chefs who want to take the next step in their careers. It is a comprehensive 6-month course that is based in unit and out of work days at our specialist kitchen in Dublin. All practical kitchen aspects are covered from advanced butchery, baking and patisserie to fishmonger-y and a load lot more. We also cover the theory side of the kitchen which is often overlooked, so we look at menu planning, customer demographics, nutrition, gross profit and waste reduction. The chef academy is finished with a theory and practical exam to showcase your newly acquired skills. On successful completion of all your course work – it is then marked for City & Guilds accreditation with the final outcome being a WorldChefs City & Guilds 8499-01 Certified Professional Cook (Commis Chef).

Junior Chef Academy
Our 6-month Junior Chef Academy is aimed for our general assistant population who have decided to pursue their catering career with Compass of whom have proved themselves in their respective units and been promoted to basic food duties. What we aim for at the Junior Chef Academy is to give the students a good strong foundation to build on. As it is run alongside our Chef Academy a lot of the work is the similar, we just run it at an easier pace and cover more basic skills, but for those who excel, the possibility of gaining their City & Guides is definitely a possibility.