A big issue in the industry at present is getting apprentices trained. A lot of hairdressers are becoming self-employed or renting a chair and apprentices are no longer staying with salons after they qualify, as they feel they may not have as good a career path. We’re also noticing less school leavers looking to become salon apprentices and one of the main reasons for this is that they are unaware of the career options and opportunities available to them in the hairdressing industry.
Investing in training is so important for salon owners. At KAM we continually invest in training to allow our apprentices and our team to be able to constantly progress. This helps to retain our apprentices and stylists, as it shows our commitment to them and their development and keeps them motivated at work.
When investing in training for your team you should look at all outlets available to you – how you can train the team online, in salon, through looking at training with outside vendors and training with product brands. A mix of all these training methods will help develop your team’s skills and knowledge, keep them passionate and their morale high.
At KAM we also look at other additional methods where we can invest in training. One of the ways we do this is by using the profit the team make in retail sales, which we invest this back into training. This allows us to always be able to provide consistent training and shows the team how much we value them.
We always have regular one-to-ones with our team to talk to them individually about their career goals, what their plans are and what they want to achieve. By doing this we can get an insight into the type of training they would like and how they would like to develop their skills to allow us to help them achieve their goals.
Training for us is not a ‘one size fits all’ and we invest in our training for individual team members too. We have had many of team interested in becoming Matrix Hair Colour Masters, which for us is something very worthwhile to invest in, as once qualified we can promote our team as being colour experts, which can attract new clients and build our teams columns.
Apprentices love to hear that the salon they have chosen to work with has opportunities available for them to progress. Through our recruitment campaigns, we always shout about the benefits we offer our team, including training, career progression and offering our apprentices and team the opportunity to get involved with events outside of the salon within the industry and local community along with working on photo-shoots.
At KAM we also hold competitions with our apprentices. This includes in-house competitions on doll heads, where our apprentices are required to create mood boards and carry out the look to present to the team and often an external judge. Our salon brand, Matrix, also provide our apprentices with competitions, which again can include creating looks on doll heads. These competitions are great for helping our apprentices to perfect their skills and for boosting morale with our apprentices working to the best of their ability to win the competitions.
Now more than ever we need to shout about what we offer to apprentices and attract them to come and work at the salon. There are so many great opportunities within the industry and many apprentices are not aware of this. Investing in training is of upmost importance and through doing this, we can make our salons more successful by retaining a happy team that want to strive to be their best and that do not want to go self-employed but instead, want to stay and grow with the company.
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